New Route to End Utah's Wilderness Stalematehttp://www.hcn.org/issues/45.12/eastern-utahs-wilderness-stalemate
Can one of the West's most conservative, anti-federal lands lawmakers broker a mega-wilderness deal in the Beehive state?On Feb. 15, 2013, Congressman Rob Bishop, a Republican from a deeply conservative stretch of northern Utah, sent a letter to groups representing environmentalists, oil and gas companies, off-road vehicle users and others, announcing his plan to end the state's decades-long wilderness war.

The missive didn't specify what was at stake -- millions of acres of jaw-dropping red-rock desert, lands that hold riches in oil and gas, and that, if opened to off-road riding, could be a motorhead's Disneyland -- but the battle-hardened recipients needed no reminder. Conservationists have long wanted these lands protected forever, but dozens of wilderness bills have gone down in flames, thanks to people like Bishop, who blocked any legislation that would "lock up" Western land.

Now, Bishop claimed he wanted to turn over a new leaf. "I believe Utah is ready to move away from the tired arguments of the past," he wrote. "We have a window of opportunity to end the gridlock and bring resolution to some of the most challenging land disputes in the state."

He asked each group to list its priorities for eastern Utah's public lands -- wilderness protection, energy development and everything in between. His plan wouldn't cover the entire state, but it would include some of Utah's most spectacular and contested landscapes, including the area around Canyonlands National Park, the San Rafael Swell, the Book Cliffs and Desolation Canyon -- 5.5 million acres that conservationists believe are worthy of wilderness protection, plus the energy-rich Uintah Basin.

"I look forward to working with you as we move into the next phase of this critically important endeavor," Bishop concluded. "I ask that you please provide your list of priorities via email … no later than March 15, 2013."

One month to lay the groundwork for resolving a war that had been raging for a generation, from Washington, D.C., to the Statehouse in Salt Lake City, inside county commission chambers and out on the sand and slickrock.

To many of its recipients, the letter seemed to drop out of the sky. The rhetorical battle between conservationists and state leaders, and between Utah's elected officials and the federal government, had recently boiled over for the umpteenth time. Led by chest-thumping states-rights advocate Gov. Gary Herbert, Utah was suing the feds for control over 19,000 miles of rights of way across public lands -- a blatant frontal attack on proposals to protect those lands as wilderness. If that wasn't enough, Herbert and the state Legislature were pouring millions of tax dollars into a dubious campaign to take control of 22 million acres of federal land, arguing that it had been stolen from the state, which they insisted could do a better job of managing it anyway.

Conservationists, in turn, had taken their cause to a friendly Interior Department, asking officials to provide temporary protection for a 1.4 million-acre bulwark of mountains, sandstone spires and river canyons surrounding Canyonlands National Park, and to initiate a public process to explore long-term protection. Internet chat boards lit up with chatter about the "Greater Canyonlands conspiracy" and bitter reminders of the last "federal land grab" in Utah in 1996, when President Clinton designated the 1.7 million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, a move that still chafes many locals.

The Outdoor Industry Association and more than 100 gear companies threw gas on the flames when they sent President Obama a letter urging him to use his executive powers to protect the area as Greater Canyonlands National Monument.In Moab, furious off-road vehicle enthusiasts and self-proclaimed Sagebrush Rebels organized a boycott of businesses that supported the monument. The backlash was so vitriolic, says one local mountain-bike tour operator, that "there were a couple of weeks there when I was worried about my son wearing his Patagonia coat to school."

Bishop had made no secret about where he stood. When an Obama administration plan to provide temporary protection for the state's wild lands came to light in late 2010, he howled that it was the work of "far left extremists who oppose the multiple uses of our nation's public lands." A longtime critic of federal environmental laws, and federal power in general, he told The Salt Lake Tribune that conservationists and the outdoor industry were "trying to do an end-run around what is good for Utah."

But here he was, just a few months later, holding out an olive branch, promising to put an end to the fighting.

If you want to understand the fragile détente currently being negotiated in Utah, take a trip to St. George, in the southwest corner of the state. It wasn't all that long ago that the town was a sleepy Mormon backwater -- "Utah's Dixie," as locals called it, because the area's earliest Mormon pioneers, lead by Robert Dockery Covington, a Southern slave owner, hoped to grow cotton here.

The old town center has survived -- the original Mormon temple, hewn from tawny native sandstone, the wide, well-tended green, and Thomas Judd's general store, established in 1911, where you can still buy Judd's famous breadsticks with cheese sauce. But in the late 1990s and early 2000s, St. George and the rest of Washington County exploded. For a while, it was among the fastest growing counties in the U.S., as Vegas-style suburban development sprawled into the desert east, south and west of town.

Today, the county's population has topped 140,000. The old town center is surrounded by a sea of clay-tile roofs tucked behind iron gates flanked with burbling fountains -- housing developments with names like Sedona Hills, Artesia Terrace and Lakota Ridge.

But north of all this, flame-colored cliffs rise like a dragon's back -- and much of that land is protected as wilderness. To the northwest, Red Mountain, a buttress of sandstone the color of dried blood, rises 1,500 feet straight out of the subdivisions. To the northeast, Cottonwood Canyon snakes through domes of Navajo sandstone. These wilderness areas are bound together by the Red Cliffs National Conservation Area, a 45,000-acre swath of land that is jointly managed by federal, state and local governments to protect the threatened Mojave Desert tortoise and other wildlife.

The deal that protected that land was born in the early 2000s, largely out of frustration. For 20 years, conservationists, led by the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA), had fought to pass a mammoth statewide wilderness bill. They'd scoured the state for lands worth protecting, ratcheting up their proposal to cover 9.4 million acres and building a national following in the process. But without support from Utah's congressional delegation, the proposal foundered time and again. In the absence of a resolution, the players resolutely stuck to their roles: SUWA fought to protect wild areas with lawsuits and executive action from allies in the White House, while anti-wilderness interests punched back with claims that the counties held rights of way across many roadless areas.

Even as Utah was mired in a stalemate, however, other Western states were negotiating deals over smaller-scale, locally generated wilderness bills. Utah's then-governor, Olene Walker, took notice and approached the state's county commissions, asking for volunteers for a first Utah attempt. Washington County jumped.

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What convinced the county commissioners, traditionally hostile to wilderness protection, to come to the table? It was all that growth. Inspired by a similar deal in Nevada, they realized that they could use wilderness as a bargaining chip to win more ground for subdivisions and shopping malls.

But the path forward was anything but smooth. The original Washington County lands bill, championed by Republican Sen. Bob Bennett and introduced in the House by Utah's token Democrat, Jim Matheson, was a developer's dream. It would have protected approximately 220,000 acres of wilderness, including much of what was proposed for the county by SUWA. In return, roughly 24,000 acres of federal lands could be sold off for development. The bill would have also laid the groundwork for a new highway that would cut through endangered desert tortoise habitat, connecting St. George's booming western suburbs to Interstate 15. And 8 percent of the proceeds from land sales would have gone to the local water conservancy district to fund a long-dreamed-of pipeline to pull water from Lake Powell.

The bill outraged locals who dreaded more uncontrolled sprawl as well as environmentalists and their friends in Congress, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. "Reid wouldn't let it happen," says Alan Gardner, a rancher and longtime county commissioner who has sold ground to developers, with obvious bitterness. "What was good for Nevada couldn't be good for anywhere else."

It would be more than a year before Bennett and Matheson would take their bill back to Washington, D.C. In that time, Washington County would go through a major strategic planning process called Vision Dixie, which involved extensive public input and revealed that most locals supported managed growth and opposed selling off federal lands. Bennett also met with conservation groups and made a series of concessions to win their support.

By the time it was reintroduced in 2008, the bill included more than 260,000 acres of wilderness, a substantial increase from the original, as well as "wild and scenic" designation for 165 miles of the Virgin River in and around Zion National Park, and the creation of two new national conservation areas. Rights of way for the highway and Lake Powell pipeline were dropped and federal land sales were cut to approximately 9,000 acres.

The new bill won the support of national conservation groups, including The Wilderness Society, The Nature Conservancy and the National Parks Conservation Association, but SUWA and a local group called Citizens for Dixie's Future still opposed it. It failed a second time, and the county made yet more concessions before it finally passed in 2009 as part of an omnibus lands bill.

Looking back, County Commissioner Gardner has mixed feelings. "Had we ever contemplated the amount of wilderness and some of the boundaries we ended up with, we never would have gotten started," he says. "The big thing the county got was resolution."

Conservationists remain similarly ambivalent: "The outcome of all this was a good wilderness bill," SUWA Executive Director Scott Groene said in a letter published in High Country News. "But the bill wasn't the result of a consensus-based process, and it shouldn't serve as a model."

To date, none of the available 9,000 acres of federal land has been sold: The real estate market imploded just as the bill finally passed. But county officials are optimistic that, once the market rebounds, the land will sell, and St. George will resume expanding.

More than anything, the Washington County deal showed local officials around Utah that wilderness designation could serve as a lever: If they were clever enough, they could use it to pry things out of environmentalists' tight fists.

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Rob Bishop is a silver-haired mountain of a man with a self-deprecating sense of humor and a gift for working a conservative crowd into a lather. He has built his career on anti-government, anti-environmentalist bombast, often delivered in the calm tones of a Mormon patriarch.

Aside from a two-year Mormon mission in Germany and his time in D.C., where he has represented Utah's first congressional district since 2002, Bishop has lived in Utah all his life. He resides in Brigham City, a town of 18,000 near the eastern shore of the Great Salt Lake. He and his wife, Jeralynn, have five children: Shule, Jarom, Zenock, Maren and Jashon -- named after people and places in the Book of Mormon.

Bishop taught high school history for more than a decade, something he often mentions in interviews and campaigns, but his main occupation has been politics. He was elected to the state House in 1978 at the age of 27 and rose through the ranks to be that body's speaker, and later, chairman of the Utah Republican Party. In 1992, he co-founded the Western States Coalition, a group of lawmakers, ranchers and Sagebrush Rebels that raised a hue and cry over President Clinton's conservation initiatives.

In D.C., Bishop has been one of the extractive industries' most loyal supporters, sponsoring at least three bills that would require the feds to "more efficiently develop" oil and gas on public lands. Oil and gas interests donated more than $58,000 to his 2012 campaign, more than any other industry, according to the nonprofit Open Secrets.

The League of Conservation Voters, meanwhile, gives Bishop a lifetime score of just 4 percent. He has campaigned to allow Border Patrol agents to drive willy-nilly across fragile desert in pursuit of "bad guys" and "potential terrorists," and supported efforts to weaken the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act and other bedrock environmental laws.

Bishop has also pushed legislation that would turn over patches of federal land to the states and supports Utah's efforts to lay claim to most of the 30-plus million acres of federal estate within its borders. At a 2011 energy summit in Uintah County, he held up a map with what looked like a red paint spatter covering roughly a third of the state. "This is the real state of Utah," he said. "Everything that's red is private property. The rest is public property. That's why I want my land back."

Still, Bishop isn't opposed to protecting wilderness when it suits his needs. He sponsored the 2006 bill that created the 100,000-acre Cedar Mountain Wilderness Area in western Utah -- the state's first new wilderness since 1984. The law, which SUWA supported, blocked a proposed rail line that would have carried radioactive waste to a storage site on the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation -- waste that the military believed could have jeopardized activities at a nearby bombing range.

But while wilderness has its uses, there's one thing Bishop simply cannot abide: the Antiquities Act, which Clinton famously used to protect Grand Staircase-Escalante in 1996. Last March, Bishop was one of the few to object to President Obama's creation of four national monuments, including the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument in New Mexico, the San Juan Islands National Monument in Washington state, and a monument in Delaware dedicated to Harriet Tubman, who helped escaped slaves make their way north along the Underground Railroad.

"There is a right way to designate federal lands, and there is a wrong way," Bishop told The Washington Post. "Executive fiat is unquestionably the wrong way and is an abuse of executive privilege."

With pressure mounting for Obama to designate a massive new monument in eastern Utah, Bishop has an opportunity to show the president, and the world, what he means by the right way. That, however, requires a dramatic change of tactics. Pulling a line from his history books, Bishop hearkens back to general-turned-president Dwight D. Eisenhower: "Eisenhower used to say, if he had a problem he couldn't solve, he made it bigger."

The same day Bishop sent his letter to stakeholders asking for input on his new wilderness project, he also wrote to commissioners in six eastern Utah counties. This second letter was more persuasive, making the case that it was in the counties' best interest to participate. It was also more frank about the rules of the game.

"Wilderness, or other land designations, can act as a currency," Bishop wrote. "If wilderness is designated in your county, you should receive some specific, tangible benefit for it."

This could be good, he argued, as counties dominated by federal lands could win rights of way for roads, special zones for energy development, or federal acreage for a local park, an airport or other amenities -- if the counties were willing to pay. "The more (wilderness) we're willing to designate," Bishop wrote, "the more we can expect on the other side of the ledger."

But while eastern Utah holds some wilderness gems, none of the communities there are booming the way that St. George was back in the early 2000s. So what, one might ask, are Bishop and the local economic interests really after? In a word: energy.

The Uintah Basin is a wide concavity in the earth that sweeps down from the Uinta Mountains in the northeast corner of Utah. The scattered communities here -- Duchesne, Roosevelt, Vernal, and the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation -- are longtime agricultural centers that have in recent decades been transformed by oil and gas development.

Ten thousand pump jacks and gas wells currently suck liquid and gaseous gold from the ground here. At night, they light up the juniper-dotted hills like bonfires. The industry, which now accounts for roughly 60 percent of the region's economy, wants to drill another 25,000 wells in the near future -- and that's just the beginning. The basin holds enough tar sands, oil shale and shale oil to keep the drill rigs and strip mines cranking for years to come.

"The neat thing about the Uintah Basin from a producer's or a geologist's standpoint is that you've got productive (rock) horizons that are stacked geologically on top of each other," says Lowell Braxton, the Utah representative for the Western Energy Alliance, an industry group. "Right now, we're working in young, shallow formations. But there's Mancos shale underneath that, which has potential as a shale oil producer, and there's potential for gas formations in the sands. And then you can keep going on down. The deepest well in the basin is 18-20,000 feet right now. People aren't drilling that deep, but the infrastructure is there -- the roads, the pipelines -- to get the resource out. Our long-term interest (as an industry) is likely to be in the Uintah Basin."

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But if companies are going to invest in this kind of development, Braxton says, they need some assurance that they're not going to be held up or locked out. "If you could increase the probability of getting a lease and not have somebody say, 'We're going to make a monument out of it, or a wilderness area,' I think you could actually do some investing in that."

A county-level wilderness deal like Washington County's just wouldn't work here, though. The Uintah Basin is carved up among at least three counties, and combined they don't hold enough wilderness "currency" to buy the kind of access Bishop and his industry friends are seeking. Thus, the regional approach: Expand the bargaining table to include wild lands south of the basin, such as Canyonlands, and maybe you have enough to trade with.

Of course, there are more than two players at this table. Any discussion of the future of wilderness and energy in Utah must include a whole range of stakeholders, from state officials and land managers to county commissioners and everyday citizens, who have a wide range of interests in the public lands. No surprise, then, that this process is taking a little longer than Bishop anticipated.

By late May, Bishop's staff reported that they'd held 160 meetings with various interest groups and county, state and federal officials, including newly minted Interior Secretary Sally Jewell. Their list of stakeholder groups has swelled into the 60s; they've opened the discussions to include more parties, brought in Utah's other Republican congressmen, Chris Stewart and Jason Chaffetz, and moved their input deadline to July 10.

Bishop's team is planning field trips in August and September to get stakeholders out on the ground. After that, details get murky, but at some point this fall or winter, they'll need to start drawing lines on maps and getting down to the difficult business of negotiating boundaries. So far, there has been little communication between the players, but the game chips are beginning to pile up.

What do the various interests want? The state government, for its part, wants to resolve longstanding issues with school trust lands. The trust lands, given to Western states by the federal government to generate revenue for the state's schools, are scattered throughout Utah. The agency that oversees them, the State of Utah Institutional Trust Lands Administration, has opened many of these parcels to energy development, and sold off others. But some of the land remains inaccessible, landlocked in a sea of federal land, and the state would love to trade those parcels out for acres that can be easily drilled or mined.

County commissioners are looking for their own land swaps to make way for development, and the kind of certainty that Lowell Braxton talks about. They are also demanding permanent rights of way across federal lands -- access routes for industry and recreation.

Hikers, mountain bikers, motorized recreationists and sportsmen -- and the increasingly vocal companies that supply them with high-tech toys -- want some assurance that they will retain unfettered access for their various pursuits. The muscle-powered recreation crowd, led by the Outdoor Industry Association and its nonprofit affiliate, the Conservation Alliance, has become an aggressive wilderness supporter.

Off-road vehicle riders, meanwhile, want "regulatory security," says Brian Hawthorne, public-lands policy director for the BlueRibbon Coalition, which represents that constituency. "We just got these new management plans (on BLM lands). Now to start a new planning process based on these new wilderness designations, national conservation areas, maybe a national monument -- there's no way." That said, Hawthorne acknowledges that there are areas in eastern Utah that merit wilderness protection.

It's incredibly complex, but what begins to emerge is a picture of a grand bargain that would protect some of Utah's most spectacular and fought-over wild lands in return for land trades that would allow for mining or other economic development, and potentially much larger-scale energy development in the Uintah Basin. It's certainly not what Utah's environmentalists have been fantasizing about these past three decades, but if Bishop can convince counties to offer up sufficient wilderness, it just might be enough to make a deal.

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When asked what's in it for him, Bishop cites the battle fatigue that you hear about from many corners these days: "It's tiresome to always have to fight over these areas."

But Bishop could also earn major political points by providing more funding for state schools and boosting rural economies. "Bishop may not give a hoot about wilderness," says Marcia Argust, policy manager for the Pew Campaign for America's Wilderness, "but he does seem to want to solve this problem for the counties and the schools -- and we're part of the equation."

Perhaps most importantly, Bishop would prove that he is capable of something more than just ranting against the government of which he is a part. The last Congress was the first since the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964 to protect not a single acre of wilderness -- and Bishop is largely responsible for that. He is chairman of the House National Parks, Forests and Public Lands Subcommittee, the gateway through which any wilderness bill must pass if it wants to see the light of day.

"I am in a position where my committee assignments can do a lot for the state of Utah," Bishop says. "I started thinking that now would be a good time to bring people together. I could say, 'Yeah, I created wilderness, but we created some kind of development at the same time. Everyone got something decent out of it.' "

That could put Bishop in line to become the next chairman of the powerful House Natural Resources Committee, whose current chair, Washington Republican Doc Hastings, has to step down soon due to term limits. And while no one's whispering about it yet, Utah's senior senator, Orrin Hatch, will be 80 next year. Utah will be looking for a new senator in the not-too-distant future, and with a massive wilderness and energy deal in his trophy case, Bishop would be a strong contender.

Bishop says, so far, he's optimistic about the prospects for a grand deal. "And that scares me," he adds. "It's never a done deal until it's actually done."

Scott Groene sits in his office in Moab on a scorching early summer day, the mercury hovering around 106 degrees. Through his window, the executive director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance can see the sandstone turrets of Arches National Park, the place that, in many ways, sparked the fight to protect Utah's red-rock country and has carried it in the public's imagination all these years.

For several months, Groene has been impossible to reach by phone, emailing that it's too early in the process to know where Bishop's proposal will go, or if it will move at all. But today, he's talkative, upbeat -- still careful with his words, but almost giddy with the scope of the discussions underway.

"It's likely that there's not much we agree with Bishop on in general on public lands," Groene says. "But we worked really well with him on the Cedar Mountains wilderness bill. It intrigues us to see what we can accomplish here."

SUWA has been meeting privately with a coalition of other conservation groups to hash out an offer that they plan to present to Bishop later this summer. Still in draft stages, it includes new wilderness areas on both BLM and Forest Service land, plus new national conservation areas. In return, sources involved with the discussions say they're willing to give Bishop and his allies much of what they want.

In addition to conceding a substantial amount of the land they're now proposing for wilderness, conservationists would cease fighting many of the rights of way on federal lands that counties claim. The groups also seem willing to agree, in principle, to a massive land trade, swapping scattered patches of school-trust lands for drilling and mining ground in the Uintah Basin.

Others have been meeting, too, sketching out their own versions of a deal, but their numbers are less ambitious than the conservation crowd's. Grand County Commissioner Lynn Jackson, a Moab resident, says discussions on the county level have been in the range of 1.5 to 2 million acres of wilderness -- a non-starter for conservationists -- plus a couple of national recreation areas. "To me, as a Westerner, this is the way you do it," Jackson says. "You negotiate, you horse-trade. Everybody gets a piece of the pie. But we're not going to get a bill that makes everybody happy."

If Washington County's wilderness deal is any kind of guide, the negotiating process will be dramatic and filled with land mines. True to form, though the actual work of drawing lines on maps has yet to begin, already both the commissioners and conservationists have nearly stomped away. Environmentalists erupted when yet another letter from Bishop seemed to suggest that he would entertain wilderness designation only for lands officially identified in 1980s surveys as "wilderness study areas." He later explained that this was not the letter's intent, but it raised suspicions that his overtures might just be a ruse to prevent Obama from designating a Greater Canyonlands National Monument.

Conservationists asked Bishop to create a professionally facilitated public process surrounding the proposal, but so far, the dialogue has largely been between Bishop's staff and individual stakeholders, with the extractive industry and county and state officials enjoying the most access to the congressman. "None of the meetings any of us (environmentalists) have ever been involved in have ever gotten serious about talking about places, or gotten stakeholders together to try to work anything out," says Bill Hedden, executive director of the Grand Canyon Trust and a member of SUWA's board of directors. "There has been no process, no negotiation whatsoever to this point."

Local officials, meanwhile, were enraged when Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune came through Moab in June, once again raising the spectre of a national monument.

From the outside, it looked like the nation's biggest environmental group was trying to increase the pressure on counties to cut a deal or suffer the consequences.

"If he was interested in turning up the heat, he sure did that, but he might have just torpedoed the whole process," Jackson says. "We need some assurance out of the White House that if we work on good faith with Rep. Bishop and work something out, they're not going to slap a monument on us, too."

There's no telling what will happen when the four-wheelers get involved, or the local extractive industries, or those Sagebrush Rebels who see any wilderness as a serious threat to their freedom. And even if Bishop is able to convince them all to hammer out a deal, any bill will have to win the support of Utah's other congressional representatives. Will Sen. Mike Lee, a hard-line right-winger who unseated Bennett in the Republican primaries in 2010, agree to a massive wilderness bill on his watch? Will Sen. Hatch, who took a sharp tack to the right during his last primary in order to beat a Tea Party rival, tilt back toward the center and lend his support?

All of these questions still hover in the hot desert air. But despite many misgivings, most of the people who have been privy to the conversation so far express a surprisingly widespread sense of optimism. "We're ready to do something big, we're ready to play, let's do this," says Cody Stewart, Gov. Herbert's energy adviser.

"Sooner is better than later," says Bishop when asked when he'd like to have a bill ready. "We've got a new secretary of Interior coming online. The Interior Department is more receptive to new ideas than they have been. Not to disparage past leadership, but everyone looks at things anew."

On good days, environmentalists are calling this the deal that could protect enough ground that it puts SUWA out of business. "That's always been our goal," Groene says, when the notion is put to him. "It would be a remarkable success.

"I know where the smart money would be on this thing," he adds. "More likely than not, there will be no success. It's just too big and too challenging."

Where's SUWA's money, then? Groene pauses, then replies: "We're willing to spend all of our time and resources working on it. Whether that's a smart bet, that's a different question. But we're in."

Former High Country News editor Greg Hanscom is now a senior editor at Grist.org. A Utah native, he lives in Seattle.

This story was funded with reader donations to the High Country News Research Fund.

"Folks in the rural West see kids in Grand Junction driving trucks for Halliburton making $80,000 a year. They see these jobs as good jobs, but they aren't going to last. (Utah Republican Rep. Jason) Chaffetz has said, 'We wouldn't want to do anything now that would prevent us from getting high-paid extraction jobs in the future.' Actually, you might. Look at the loads of people leaving Salt Lake City to move to Moab.

"Land in its natural state … is the basis of the tourism economy in southern Utah and, just as importantly, quality-of-life recruits. A business that is based on land in its natural state is going to be the one that lasts. Wilderness is a good tool for protecting that land in its natural state."

Lynn JacksonGrand County commissioner, worked for the BLM for 32 years

"As Westerners, we're all getting pretty fed up with small minority groups with access to power wiping out huge swaths of our landscapes.

"When the (Greater Canyonlands) monument proposal first came out, we (the Grand County Council) sent a letter to the president. We said, 'We're not opposed to having a discussion, but a process where there's absolutely no dialogue, no discussion, no debate -- we're absolutely opposed to that.' And that's exactly what these 1906 Antiquities Act monuments are.

"I moved into Moab in 1982. We had a one-industry economy, and that industry was uranium mining. When Three Mile Island (nuclear disaster) struck, the price of uranium plummeted. This town nearly went into the dust. If this monument comes in, boom, we're back to complete reliance on one industry: tourism."

"When I started, in 1989, you could drive your motorcycle or your bulldozer anywhere you wanted in Utah. SUWA realized that was a problem, and we did too. The BLM updated its management plans and designated trails. We lost 50 percent of our riding areas. Now, except for a few little sand dune areas, we're limited to trails.

"We're looking to keep what we have. We would like to see travel plans (on public lands) secure, not a never-ending trail closure process. The trail system could be improved -- re-routing trails, or maybe connecting two trails to make a loop. In some areas, we want to add trails. But the BLM is already doing that.

Lowell BraxtonUtah representative for the Western Energy Alliance, an oil and gas industry group

"We (in the oil and gas industry) are really not against wilderness. Most geologists and industry people, we hunt and we fish and we run wild rivers. We're against the uncertainty in the (leasing) process right now.

"One of the big mistakes we made as a state is saying we ought to wait this thing out. I've been working in Utah since the late '70s. The company I was working for in '76 had some property in a wilderness study area. We pushed on the BLM and they said, 'Don't worry, this should be resolved in a year.'

"I really believe that of all the opportunities I've heard since this started in the late '70s, this is one of the more serious ones. ... If somebody spits in the soup, the deal could be off, but I haven't seen that yet."

"In Southern Utah and Salt Lake City, there's been support for wilderness for a long time, but it hasn't been reflected in Utah's leadership. The question is, can you put enough on the table here that you can get (state leaders) to agree to things that they might not otherwise?

"There really isn't a model for this, because of the magnitude. The Washington County bill was a pretty small, simple bill. The county-level stuff had crashed -- efforts to redo the Washington County process in Paiute and Beaver and Millard counties. I think people are starting over here. There are plenty of complexities, but … some of us believe that that's what might make it successful."

]]>No publisherPoliticsUtah2013/07/22 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleGlobal warming's reluctant poster childhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/45.4/climate-change-turns-an-already-troubled-ski-industry-on-its-head/global-warmings-reluctant-poster-child
The ski industry, for whom bad press means all the difference between a banner year and a bust, tries to manage public perception of climate change's impact on snowfall and resort conditions. When a report warning of global warming's disastrous impacts on skiing garnered national headlines in December, activists hoped the news would encourage a serious response both at home and in Washington, D.C. But the ski industry itself, where bad press means all the difference between a banner year and a bust, greeted the headlines with all the enthusiasm of a rainstorm on the slopes.

Industry leaders quickly jumped in to do damage control. Vail Resorts ran an ad in TheNew York Times under the banner, "The Climate HAS CHANGED," with photos of skiers and snowboarders wallowing in fresh powder at the company's playgrounds, which include Vail, Beaver Creek, Keystone and Breckenridge in Colorado, as well as three resorts around Lake Tahoe.

The company's CEO, Rob Katz, wrote a letter to the editor of the Denver Post berating those who "alarm people with images of melting snow." "Count me in the category of someone who is very worried about climate change," Katz wrote, and then added, "You can count me out of the group that says we need to address climate change to save skiing."

The reaction revealed an industry deeply torn between protecting its long-term survival and ensuring its short-term profitability. "Ski area owners and operators are aware of the scientific studies and projections regarding the long-term potential impacts of climate change," the National Ski Areas Association said in a position statement, "but we remain optimistic as an industry."

The forecast does not inspire confidence, however. The report that made headlines in December, Climate Impacts on the Winter Tourism Economy in the United States, provided a long list of alarming reminders: By the end of the century, winter temperatures are projected to warm an additional 4 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit in North America. In high-emissions scenarios, the winter snowpack in the Cascades and the Sierra is projected to decrease between 40 and 70 percent by 2050. If we continue to pollute the way we do now, skiing will be confined to the top quarter of Aspen Mountain in average years by the end of the century. Utah's Park City Mountain Resort will have no snowpack whatsoever.

The report then attempted to put a price tag on all this, calculating that, over the course of the last decade, ski areas lost more than $1 billion in potential revenue to bad snow years. Failure to respond quickly to climate change, the authors wrote, "spells economic devastation for a winter sports industry deeply dependent upon predictable, heavy snowfall."

Commissioned by the nonprofit Protect Our Winters (POW for short) and the Natural Resources Defense Council, the report was part of a broader effort to highlight the economic significance of outdoor recreation, and to use that as a lever to promote conservation. But the ski industry has been reluctant to talk about this looming catastrophe, even for the sake of prolonging its own life.

"It's a tough reality to swallow," says Elizabeth Burakowski, a Ph.D. candidate in snow science at the University of New Hampshire and one of the report's co-authors. "It's bad for business."

The National Ski Areas Association does have a program called the Climate Challenge that encourages resorts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions -- though it says nothing about all the emissions spewed when skiers travel to the resorts -- and it has advocated for clean energy programs on the national level. And many individual resorts, including Vail, have cleaned up their operations by shifting to renewables like wind power. But when it comes to the larger fight against climate change, most industry leaders say they have enough to worry about already.

Nationally, the number of visits to ski resorts has remained essentially flat since the industry started keeping track in 1979. Analysts blame younger people, who aren't replacing aging Baby Boomers, the ski industry's main market. And now comes the news that snowboarding, a sport largely credited for saving the industry in the 1990s, is on a steep downhill slide. A report released this winter by RRC Associates, a company that tracks winter recreation, found that the percentage of snowboarding visits to ski areas has declined over the past two years, while the number of days boarders head to the mountain has dropped sharply in the past decade.

At Mammoth Mountain, environmental affairs director Ron Cohen says he's got his hands full just keeping up with Forest Service and state regulations. The ski area, he says, simply lacks the resources to be more active on climate change. "Everybody knows -- people who work here and think about strategy -- we're not ignorant of the issue," Cohen says. "We know that there are these discussions, these issues, scientific theories, facts -- all of the above -- but we're focused on business strategy a lot more than we are on something we have a lot less control over."

]]>No publisherClimate Change2013/03/04 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticleCan Sally Jewell interest a new generation in public lands?http://www.hcn.org/issues/45.4/can-sally-jewell-interest-a-new-generation-in-public-lands
The chief of Recreation Equipment Inc. has worked hard to support conservation and get people of all ages and colors outside. Can she do the same at the Department of Interior?The giant flagship store of REI -- Recreational Equipment Inc. -- is a steel- and timber-framed temple to outdoor consumerism, complete with a glass steeple that encases an indoor climbing spire. It's something of a spiritual center for downtown Seattle, where "business casual" includes pants with zip-off legs and Vibram 5 Finger "barefoot running" shoes. On an ordinary weekend, hiking the wooded trails on nearby Tiger Mountain, you're likely to run into people schlepping enough gear to tackle a Himalayan expedition -- and, to be fair, some are preparing to do just that.

This is the world of Sally Jewell, REI's 56-year-old CEO, frequent mountain climber, and President Obama's nominee for secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior. It's about as far from the cowboy-hat-wearing farming and ranching culture of current Interior Secretary Ken Salazar -- and many of his predecessors -- as you could get this side of the Mississippi.

If the Senate confirms Jewell, as seems likely, she will oversee the national parks, wildlife refuges, and Bureau of Land Management holdings that make up fully one-fifth of the country, and a much larger portion of the West. She will also serve as the government's chief liaison with Indian tribes and become "master" of the region's rivers.

Much of Jewell's work will involve finishing what Salazar started: Overseeing major domestic energy development, including on- and off-shore oil, gas and wind energy. She will inherit decades-old fights over wilderness, water, endangered species and wild horses. But perhaps her greatest challenge -- and one for which she may be uniquely suited -- will be to begin to make the public lands, and her department, relevant to a diverse new generation of wired and largely urban Westerners.

Jewell likely caught the president's attention due to her industry's recent rise into the national spotlight. A 2012 report from the Outdoor Industry Association, a trade group, estimates that Americans spend $645 billion annually on outdoor recreation. "To put our industry into perspective, we're 50 percent larger than domestic mining and drilling," Jewell said, unveiling the report at a press conference. "We're a little less effective at lobbying than the extractive industries, but we're an important part of the economy."

Ironically, however, Jewell will take over Interior even as her industry faces a crisis. A 2012 report from the Outdoor Foundation, a nonprofit arm of the Outdoor Industry Association, found that although a third of outdoor recreationists are between the ages of 6 and 24, participation slackens with age, meaning that the overall numbers could decline dramatically in the coming decades. The report also found that 78 percent of participants are white, in a country that, according the U.S. Census Bureau, will have more non-white than white children in five years, and will be "majority minority" within three decades.

Jewell has helped lead the effort to get more young people and people of color into the outdoors. REI's 100-plus stores offer classes, outings and volunteer opportunities. The company-funded REI Foundation made $445,000 in grants in 2011 to organizations focused on getting children and families, particularly people of color, outside. A gift of $150,000 to the Outdoor Foundation funded a series of youth summits under the banner of "Outdoor Nation," billed as a youth-led movement to reconnect young people to the natural world.

In 2011, Jewell was a featured speaker at a White House Conference on the Obama administration's sweeping Great Outdoors initiative. Among other things, it calls for the creation of a 21st Century Conservation Service Corps, funded by fees collected from offshore oil and gas leasing. Greens hope that efforts like these will help nurture a new generation of conservationists at a time when the membership of environmental organizations, like the outdoor recreation crowd, is dominated by graying white folks.

Interior is in the midst of its own demographic crisis. More than half its employees are over 50; 34 percent will be eligible to retire within five years. Salazar's Interior created an "inclusive workplace strategy," with diversity training for mid-level managers, and a new youth office that engages young people from communities with historically lower participation rates, as well as young women and girls.

Interior has already increased the number of young hires exponentially, says Rhea Suh, assistant secretary for policy, management and budget. The challenges "present us with huge opportunities to bring varied backgrounds and perspectives to our workplace."

All this talk of getting more people outdoors does not sit well with everyone, given that land-management budgets are in shambles and there are billions of dollars worth of maintenance backlogs. Conservationists and cash-strapped land managers have fretted for years about public lands being "loved to death."

Which brings us to Sally Jewell's final challenge. Obama has promised to increase drilling on public lands while also balancing development with conservation. To date, however, according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress, he has protected less land administratively than any of the previous four presidents.

Republicans in Congress are sure to obstruct significant conservation bills and throw up roadblocks to administrative changes. (The GOP stripped the funding from Salazar's most ambitious conservation initiative, which would have allowed the BLM to survey and protect areas with wilderness characteristics.) But Obama has one tool that he can wield without congressional input: The Antiquities Act. Bruce Babbitt, President Clinton's Interior secretary, famously helped convince Clinton to use the act to create a slew of new national monuments.

In his recent State of the Union Address, President Obama threatened to take action on climate change if Congress fails to do so. Perhaps, with a little nudging from Jewell and the outdoor industry, he can be convinced that America's favorite playgrounds are equally worthy of forceful action.

]]>No publisherPolitics2013/03/04 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticleClimate change turns an already troubled ski industry on its headhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/45.4/climate-change-turns-an-already-troubled-ski-industry-on-its-head
California's Mammoth Mountain provides a case study on the uncertainty of the ski business, and how global warming threatens to make it even more unpredictable. George Shirk sits in his office at the Mammoth Times on a Saturday afternoon, with his dog, Fido, who writes his own weekly column for the paper, curled up underneath the desk. Early December is the quiet time between the Thanksgiving and Christmas rushes at Mammoth Mountain Ski Area, and Shirk, a 60-year-old news veteran with a sandy smoker's voice, has kindly agreed to give me an armchair tour of his adopted hometown.

Mammoth Lakes is perched in the Eastern Sierra, a half-day's walk from some of California's most spectacular high country. "The first time I drove over Tioga Pass and saw the Eastern Sierra, my eyes just bugged out," says Shirk, who bought a condo here in 1997 and moved up full-time a few years later after a career that took him from the Philadelphia Inquirer to the San Francisco Chronicle.

"We're really out here," Shirk says, rattling off the drive times to urban centers such as San Diego (six and a half hours), L.A. (five hours), and the San Francisco Bay Area (five and a half, minimum). "People take day-long trips to go to Costco in Reno. It's a little like living on Mars."

Nursing a cup of black coffee ("You take cream or sugar? No? Good, because I don't have any"), Shirk divides Mammoth's 8,000-or-so year-round residents into three groups: People who are running from something, like a failed career or a ruined marriage; skiers, climbers and other athletes drawn to the landscape as a testing ground; and "the artists, the dreamers." Shirk himself fits the last category, and maybe the first, as well.

The second group -- the athletes -- has included such greats as three-time Olympian Andrea Mead Lawrence, the first American skier to win two gold medals in alpine skiing. Lawrence, who died in 2009, spent decades fighting to protect her beloved mountains as well as the surrealistic landscape of Mono Lake, about 30 miles north of here. These days, local downhiller Stacey Cook and ski cross phenom John Teller, a mechanic at Mammoth's Center Street Garage, are spending time atop the world's racing podiums.

Others here don't fit so neatly into Shirk's matrix -- young anglos and Hispanics of all ages who come to schlep dishes, clean hotel rooms and run the lifts, and the wealthy weekenders and second-homeowners who bankroll the whole show. Mammoth's service workers struggle in ways familiar to any Western ski town: low wages, high rents, and housing conditions that can verge on the inhumane. The well-to-do part-timers have their pick of condos and vacation homes tucked amid the grand old Jeffrey pines or clustered at base areas connected to the ski slopes by chairlifts and gondolas. There's even a cookie-cutter base "village" (called The Village), built in the early 2000s by the real estate giant Intrawest, featuring a Starbucks, a Ben & Jerry's, a Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory, a boutique leather shop and, of course, a real estate office.

Rising over it all like a local deity is Mammoth Mountain, an 11,053-foot dormant volcano that rises just east of the Sierra Nevada proper. "It's the lifeblood. The food," says Shirk.

But Mammoth Mountain can't nurture this community if the snow doesn't fall, and if the tourists quit descending from the skies in planes from Southern California or rolling up the highway from the coast. As the climate warms, both may become even less reliable. There are already indications that the long-term future looks bleak.

If you're going to bet on snow, Mammoth is as good a place as any in the Lower 48 to do so. The Sierra as a whole is famous for the stuff -- the range's proper name, Sierra Nevada, literally means "snowy mountains." Storms blowing in from the Pacific Ocean hit the Sierra like the 49ers' offensive line, dumping feet upon feet of wet, heavy snow that buries highways, takes out power lines and sends avalanches thundering down the mountainsides.

Mark Williams, a University of Colorado snow hydrologist who did his Ph.D. work near Mammoth, describes a 1986 avalanche so powerful that it blasted the water out of an alpine lake, scattering fish across the surface of the snow. Four years earlier, a torrent of wet snow swept across Alpine Meadows Ski Area near Lake Tahoe, destroying the building that housed the ski patrol and ski school, damaging two lifts and a day lodge, and burying the parking lot in 10 to 20 feet of debris. Seven people were killed.

But Mammoth Mountain stands by itself when it comes to snow. Storms whipped up over the ocean are funneled up the San Joaquin River Valley through a low point in the Sierra crest, slamming directly into the peak, where they drop an average of more than 350 inches of the white stuff each year. There are other places that chalk up similar depths, but few as dependably as Mammoth. Even its neighboring resorts in the Sierra are more vulnerable to annual El Niño or La Niña ocean temperature fluctuations. "The Sierras see really high year-to-year variation in snowfall, particularly in the Tahoe region," Williams says. "The only place you don't see much of that is Mammoth."

It was this apparent snow magnetism that first attracted Dave McCoy, a hydrographer for the L.A. Department of Water and Power, to the mountain in the 1930s. McCoy and the Eastern Sierra Ski Club put up a rope tow in 1941. A dozen years later, the Inyo National Forest gave him a permit to operate a ski resort.

Earlier attempts to build an economy here had failed -- "Mammoth" was named by boosters trying to attract prospectors to the area, but the hills produced few minerals of any value. McCoy managed to build a business on the steady supply of white gold, however, and over the years, Mammoth became a favorite destination for Southern California skiers, generations of whom learned to ski here, coming up through the local racing program.

Of course, the snow didn't always arrive. The mid-'70s saw a couple of brutally dry years. Locals still talk about the drought in the late 1980s and early '90s, and "Black Monday," the day in 1991 that the ski area laid off 150 employees. But snow-making equipment installed in the 1990s allowed the resort to even out some of the corrugations in the natural snowfall patterns, and there have been plenty of years when manmade snow was hardly necessary.

The consistent snow and loyal customers caught the eye of Intrawest, the developer that patented the hyper-engineered, ticky-tacky base "village" concept that has swept across ski country. The company bought a controlling interest in Mammoth Mountain in 1996 and plowed millions into new base areas, high-speed chairlifts and other improvements.

Intrawest's 2005 buyout by Starwood Capital Group, a real estate and hotel investment group with a reputation for turning rough-around-the-edges resorts into chic getaways for the wealthy, generated enough speculative buying to help keep local housing prices high through 2007, even as the national economy faltered. While the national economic slowdown sent Mammoth's skier numbers tumbling over a cliff -- from an all-time high of 1.5 million visits in 2005-'06 to just over a million the following winter -- they began to rally the very next year, and rose steadily thanks to a succession of epic winters.

The winter of 2010-'11 was the biggest snow year in recorded history at Mammoth Mountain. Fifty-five feet fell at the summit. On several days, it snowed and blew so hard that managers couldn't open the lifts, but when they did, the skiing was like something out of a dream. In town, snow and ice toppled massive old-growth trees, smashing rooftops and power lines. Locals lost cars in the drifts and didn't recover them until spring. Steve Searles, a wildlife specialist who works to keep the peace between the people and the local population of black bears, calls it "biblical."

Mammoth residents can be forgiven, then, for thinking that snow would always be their savior.

----

Last winter, however, after early storms that got the lifts running in time for the Thanksgiving 2011 rush, Mammoth was socked with a merciless dry spell. Nary a flake fell between Dec. 1 and the end of January. Just over the usually snowbound Tioga Pass, people were ice-skating on the snow-free surface of Yosemite National Park's Tenaya Lake -- for the first time since 1930, old-timers said.

Mammoth Mountain's notorious winds, meanwhile, scattered volcanic pumice across the ski runs. "There were a couple of days when you just said, 'Wow, that was the worst skiing I have ever experienced,' " says Craig Albright, managing director of the resort's ski and snowboard school.

It didn't help that winter had apparently skipped the rest of the country as well. The TV news showed people sunning themselves in Central Park and frolicking in the Southern California surf. "The skiing got really good in March and April, but by then it was like somebody had let the air out of the tires," Albright says. "People put the skis back into the rafters and broke out the surfboard or the road bike."

The drought destroyed any hope of a quick recovery for Mammoth. Until then, speculation and snow had spared the town from complete ruin, but suddenly real estate prices were in free fall and the construction industry virtually disappeared. Starwood had bought out Intrawest at the peak of the real estate bubble; the $365 million deal was the largest in ski area history. Now, six years later, with the economy on the fritz and new condos sitting empty or unfinished, ski area owners were not only losing money on day-to-day operations, they were also paying thousands of dollars each day just to service their debts.

On Feb. 29 of last year, with skier visits 33 percent below budget and revenue down 29 percent from the previous year, Mammoth Mountain laid off 77 employees, almost a quarter of its full-time staff. Those who didn't lose their jobs took a pay cut, while some senior staff were demoted to the lift and bus lines. Locals dubbed it Black Wednesday.

"This is the mountains. Mother Nature owns the place, we just rent it," says Mammoth Mountain CEO Rusty Gregory, the former college football player who made the Black Monday cuts more than 20 years ago, and who also wielded the ax last year. "What do you do? You have a good snowmaking system, and make sure you can variabilize your expenses" -- that is, you set yourself up to quickly jettison employees and cut costs if business takes a turn for the worse.

When the final numbers were tallied, Mammoth Mountain cashed in on only 920,000 skier days last winter -- almost 300,000 fewer than the previous year and the lowest in more than a decade. When summer came, Gregory announced that Mammoth would close the nearby June Mountain Ski Area, possibly for good; the local haven hadn't been a moneymaker for years.

And as the ski area went, so did the town. Mammoth Lakes gets 60 percent of its revenue from taxes on hotel rooms and condos, and another 10-plus percent from sales taxes. If tourists don't show, the town suffers. Facing a $2.8 million shortfall in its 2011-'12 budget, town leaders set about cutting services and trimming employee pay.

Looming over it all like a cornice ready to crack was a botched plan, cooked up a decade earlier by town leaders in league with Intrawest, to turn Mammoth into a weekend destination for skiers from around the country. The plan hinged on expanding the municipal airstrip to make way for huge 757 and 767 jets from Dallas and Chicago. It would have freed Mammoth from some of its dependence on Southern California and allowed it to better compete with Rocky Mountain resorts at a time when the number of skiers nationwide had flattened out.

In an effort to win millions of federal dollars for the airport expansion, however, the town reneged on its prior approval of a developer's plans to build a hotel, a gas station and a commercial center near the airport -- amenities that the Federal Aviation Administration deemed incompatible with the increased air traffic. The airport expansion sputtered and the federal dollars never materialized, but the developer sued, claiming the town had breached its contract with him. After a string of court rulings, in the midst of Mammoth's winter of discontent, a judge ordered Mammoth Lakes to pay a jaw-dropping $42.5 million -- nearly three times the town's annual operating budget.

On July 3, hobbled by the terrible winter season and unable to pay its debt to the developer, Mammoth Lakes followed a number of busted cities and filed for bankruptcy. "This place is just crippled by debt," says Ted Carleton, editor of Mammoth's small-time alternative newspaper, The Sheet. "We are California."

Life in Western mountain towns has always been tough. It's just how it is: You live in a place that's snowed in half the year, where the economy is bound to roller-coaster along with the whims of national and international markets, whether over minerals dug out of the earth or stocks that underwrite leisure time for tourists.

But Mammoth's experience offers an inside look at how contemporary ski towns work, and particularly at how vulnerable they are to the vagaries of the economy and the weather. In good times, these communities borrow and build like mad. Encouraged by mega real estate developers, resorts take on massive debt to fund improvements and compete in the "arms race" that pits state against state and resort against resort for a limited number of skier days. Then the economy turns south or the snow doesn't come -- or it comes, but at the wrong time of the year -- and the party ends in spectacular fashion.

And now, of course, there's climate change.

In contrast to the high, cold continental climate in the Rockies, famous for their weightless powder, the Sierra lies in a maritime climate, close to the ocean. Because the air is warmer, it can hold more water vapor -- thus the Sierra's legendary dumps. But the snow is denser, wetter and warmer than the stuff you'd find in the Rockies. Colorado or Utah powder is 5 or 6 percent water, while the rest is air; "Sierra cement," as it is fondly known, can contain 40 percent water. "It's also closer to the melting point," says Williams, the CU snow hydrologist, and as a result, it is "way more sensitive to increases in air temperature."

As the climate warms -- and it will warm further, even if we summon the will to attempt to do something to slow it -- the snow line will steadily ascend the slopes. Because of their low elevations and warm climates, the maritime resorts will feel it first, says Jeff Dozier, a snow hydrologist at UC Santa Barbara who tracks the Sierra snowpack. In California, the first to be hit will be the ones on the West side, Dozier says, and in the Tahoe area.

"Mammoth is probably the most resilient of the California ski areas," Dozier says. "The main lodge is almost at 9,000 feet. But even then, you'll sometimes go up there in winter and cross the rain-snow boundary between 8,000 and 9,000 feet."

In the coming decades, that boundary will rise, meaning that lower elevations of the mountain will often see rain rather than snow. And when the temperatures are warm, the finest snow-making equipment in the world won't do any good.

Mammoth's newer base areas, which sit right around 8,000 feet, are equipped with gondolas and chairlifts that can carry guests to higher elevations. But there's another problem: Climate scientists also predict that we will continue to see more extreme weather events -- the product of adding more heat and water vapor to the atmosphere -- and wider gyrations from year to year. Climate models can't forecast the specifics with any accuracy, but the picture that emerges is of a chaotic climate that could produce a feast-and-famine cycle of back-to-back droughts and deluges.

Mammoth has survived droughts before, but it is not at all clear, particularly given its current financial state, that it could weather a sustained dry spell, or a climate that swings as wildly as it has recently.

Dozier, for one, believes that Mammoth Mountain can survive if it plays its cards right. "There's a lot of inter-annual variability anyway," he says. "Coupling the dry years with warmer temperatures -- yeah, it might be a bit worse. Still, if you have any sort of business that depends on the weather, your business plan has to take into account that some years are going to be better and some are going to be worse."

But as the 2011-'12 season in Mammoth shows, it's not just the weather that impacts ski towns. No matter how much snow falls, if the skiers don't show up, the party never gets started. Part of that is driven by the economy, but part of it is the simple fact that, if the weather in urban areas is mild, would-be skiers and snowboarders just stay home.

And if the skiers and snowboarders don't show, the local economy is dead. So perhaps it would be more accurate to say that, despite what George Shirk says, Mammoth's real lifeblood is not its namesake mountain -- it's the masses from Southern California.

As if to highlight this fact, in the midst of Mammoth's troubled 2011-'12 ski season, the city of Los Angeles sued Mammoth Lakes, arguing that it owns the water rights to Mammoth Creek, the community's primary water source. You'll recall that Dave McCoy, who founded the ski area here, stumbled upon the snowy wonderland while scouting for the L.A. Department of Water and Power. He was part of a decades-long effort by the city to buy up land and water rights along the Eastern Sierra. The DWP pipes snowmelt through a series of aqueducts and reservoirs to 3.9 million thirsty Angelinos.

In recent years, the city has been forced to relinquish some of its water to maintain Mono Lake's ecological health and to restore parts of Owens Lake, which became a lifeless dustbowl in the 1920s, when the city began diverting water from the Owens River. Now, with climate models predicting a shrinking snowpack and heat waves in coastal cities, the DWP, an infamous bully around here, is pushing back on Owens Lake and other fronts. And it appears to be making an example of tiny Mammoth Lakes, to show other towns what could happen to them if they use water that the city claims for its own.

Greg Norby, the outgoing manager of the Mammoth Lakes Community Water District, says the district is in negotiations with the DWP, and he believes that the town's water source is secure. Nonetheless, the message is clear: L.A. giveth, and L.A. can take away.

----

For the time being, the town of Mammoth Lakes appears to be pulling itself out of its recession-, weather- and lawsuit-induced slump. In September, town leaders signed an agreement with the airport developer that should create a path out of bankruptcy. The town will make a $2.5 million down payment when its bankruptcy case is dismissed, and another $2 million each July 1 for the next 23 years. To free up funds for the payments and compensate for last year's terrible winter, town leaders put in place a series of strict austerity measures this fall, including laying off almost half of the police force.

"We have cut every single ounce of fat off our bones," says Rick Wood, a local attorney and longtime town council member.

Despite the layoffs and the local grumbling, Wood is optimistic that times will get better. The real challenge, he says, is to prepare the town for the next boom. "I think it's over. I think we're at the bottom. Now we go up."

Around town, there are signs of slow recovery. New businesses are moving into boarded-up storefronts. The Black Velvet coffee shop, recently opened by former pro snowboarder Matt Hammer, is doing good business. "A good cup of coffee will change your life," Hammer likes to say. Pam Hennarty, executive director of the nonprofit Mammoth Lakes Housing, reports that the town is making steady progress improving living conditions for workers.

The real estate business is a shadow of what it was during the boom years: At the height of the bubble, in 2006 and 2007, the median price of a home here was close to $900,000; last year it was less than $600,000. But local real-estate agent and planning commission member Madeleine "Mickey" Brown says that as the market in Southern California recovers, people are starting to think about buying second homes in Mammoth again. There's even a waiting list for new condos at the Weston Monache resort hotel, just across the street from The Village.

On the mountain, meanwhile, the show goes on. During my visit in December, lift attendants called me "boss" and "old friend." Speakers blared hip-hop in the terrain park, and the runs were groomed to perfection. At McCoy Landing, visitors noshed $18 "snowboard pizzas," baked on a half of a baguette, and washed them down with $10 glasses of Mammoth Brewery's Epic IPA. On the walls above them, black-and-white photos, blown up larger than life, showed the ski area's now legendary founder, Dave McCoy, who is retired and living down-valley in Bishop with his wife, Roma. They're both in their 90s.

Albright, the ski school managing director, reported in late January that this winter has been good to the town and its mountain. More than 12 feet of snow fell at the top of the ski area in December, enough to carry the resort through a dry January. "We are having a GREAT season with good snow (and ironically some of the coldest temps we have seen in 25 years)," Albright emailed, "and it looks like it will be a long and fruitful season."

Some day, our grandkids may look back at all this -- the high-speed lifts, the manmade snow, the perfectly groomed corduroy, the opulent base developments and second homes -- much the way we regard those black-and-white images of McCoy in Mammoth's early days, sporting leather ski boots, bamboo poles and a pompadour. To them, our era may look like some Gilded Age -- a time when you could make money and have fun in the mountains, and nobody worried about the consequences.

Will there be skiing on Mammoth Mountain in 20 or 50 years? Probably -- at least when there's snow. But will there be enough snow, at the right times of the year, on a reliable enough basis, to support the kind of show that Mammoth produces now? Will the ski area be able to get itself out from under its current debt and onto solid financial footing? That is impossible to say.

"Maybe Mammoth will be the last one standing because we're up so high," muses Ted Carleton, with The Sheet. "Maybe we'll finally achieve our dream of becoming a destination resort."

"The ski industry in general, it's going to be around in a generation," says Mark Williams, who has done climate modeling for Aspen Ski Company and Park City Mountain Resort. "What we see in general is not that large of an effect in 2030. But by 2070 or 2100, in two or three generations, we reach a huge tipping point."

That's what the climate models say, but if Mammoth's story is any indication, it won't be lack of snow alone that signals the end of skiing as we know it -- though it will certainly play a part. Factors and forces from the outside will be involved: economic hard times, epic droughts in our urban centers, a populace that has more pressing or simply better things to do.

And what will happen to Mammoth Lakes if the ski area folds? It will no doubt find a way to persist, albeit with a very different and likely much smaller economy than the one that is fighting for its life today. The town has already built a respectable summer economy, with new mountain bike trails and concerts under the stars.

"This is my third recession in Mammoth," says Rick Wood. "I arrived in 1991, just in time for Black Monday. We had another dip when the tech stocks crashed in 2000. But here we are, 10 years later. Somehow people make it. This town survives."

And right now, the snow is falling, and the tourists arrive each weekend in search of good times. "We still have 24 million people in Southern California that really love Mammoth and the Eastern Sierra," Albright says. "We're their mountain home. We're just three-quarters of a (gas) tank away."

Former High Country News editor Greg Hanscom, who grew up in Park City, Utah, is now a senior editor at Grist.org. He lives in Seattle with his wife and two young daughters, whom he is teaching to ski.

This coverage is supported by contributors to the High Country News Enterprise Journalism Fund.

]]>No publisherClimate Change2013/03/03 01:10:00 GMT-6ArticleCan the outdoor gear industry wield its power for conservation? http://www.hcn.org/issues/44.12/can-the-outdoor-gear-industry-wield-its-power-for-conservation
Pioneering mountaineer Peter Metcalf built Black Diamond into a successful climbing-gear business when nobody thought it could be done. But his dream of turning the outdoor industry into a force for nature remains tantalizingly elusive.For the people drifting in rafts and kayaks through the vast silence of Desolation Canyon, the circling plane must have been a puzzle. A King Air turbo prop, it flew low over the canyon rim, dipping its wings to make wide loops over the Tavaputs Plateau and the Green River.

Below, boaters slid along the muddy surface, snaking down one of the longest stretches of wild river in the Lower 48. Desolation and its downstream cousin, Gray Canyon, are not that hard to paddle, but if you want to get away from it all, there's no better place to do it. Deso-Gray will swallow you whole, then spit you out five days and 80 miles later, sun-baked and sandy and feeling as if you've emerged from a rust-tinted dream.

So what was up with the plane? It was too big for a search plane, and too far from anywhere to be an air-tour company from Moab, away to the south. Its passengers were staring down on a fractal landscape of canyons and creek beds and mile upon mile of wind- and sun-blasted desert. What were they looking for?

The plane, as it turns out, belonged to the governor of Utah, who at that time –– in 2004 –– was Olene Walker. Walker had given permission for a delegation of land managers and business representatives to make a reconnaissance flight over Deso-Gray. The group included a representative from the governor's office, high-ranking officials with the federal Bureau of Land Management, and major outdoor-industry delegates, including Peter Metcalf, CEO of Black Diamond Equipment, a Salt Lake City-based gear company. They were there to consider protecting the land along the river corridor from the oil and gas development that was marching steadily in its direction.

The flight represented a remarkable turnaround for Utah. In May 2003, Metcalf, whose company makes equipment for mountain climbers and telemark skiers, went toe-to-toe with Walker's predecessor, Michael Leavitt, over a backroom deal Leavitt had made with the Bush administration that stripped temporary wilderness protection from 2.6 million acres of federal lands and paved the way for roads through some of Utah's last wild places. Backed by the Outdoor Industry Association, a gear manufacturers' trade group, Metcalf gave Leavitt an ultimatum: He could either end his assault on the state's wild lands or say good-bye to the twice-a-year Outdoor Retailer show, which injects tens of millions of dollars a year into Salt Lake City's economy.

The showdown pitted conservative Western politics and traditional extractive industries against a new generation of business leaders and an economy nourished by backcountry recreationists. "For boating, backcountry skiing, hiking and climbing, our natural resource is wild landscapes -- the ones that are left," Metcalf says. "If we want to have a sustainable industry 20 years hence, we need to have these environments."

Remarkably, Leavitt listened to Metcalf. He agreed to moderate his position in the roads fight and not pursue rights of way through national parks and monuments or areas deemed worthy of wilderness protection. He also created a new outdoor industry panel to advise him on land-management decisions and develop a list of outdoor "gems" worthy of protection. Walker, his successor, followed suit.

The very fact that Metcalf flew in the governor's plane that day indicated the power that the outdoor industry can wield for conservation –– if its proprietors are willing to fight for the landscapes to which they owe their existence. But now, eight years later, many conservation efforts in the West have faltered, while the outdoor industry still searches for a unified voice. And Metcalf, the industry's most aggressive leader, has begun to wonder about his own involvement. Should he keep on struggling as an inside player, or can he accomplish more as an outside agitator?

Peter Metcalf grew up on Long Island. His mother was a German Jew who came to the United States after World War II, and his father was born in China and brought to the U.S. as a youth in the late 1930s, when the Japanese bombed the city of Guangzhau. During the McCarthy era, Peter's father lost a government job for being a suspected communist, but he later found work as an economist at First National City Bank in Manhattan.

Peter's boyhood heroes –– Huckleberry Finn and Spanky from The Little Rascals –– inspired him to follow a different path. He got his first taste of rock-climbing as a teenager on a weekend trip to the Shawangunks with the Appalachian Mountain Club. In 1973, as a senior in high school, Peter and three friends piled into a 1966 Volkswagen van and drove from Long Island to Prince Rupert, British Columbia. Outfitted with wool pants and shirts and leather boots, they pioneered a new route up Mount Fairweather, a 15,600-foot, ice-capped monster that looms over Alaska's Glacier Bay.

Over the next two decades, Metcalf tackled famously forbidding peaks in North America and Europe, making the first alpine-style ascent of Denali's Southeast Face and the first climb of Mount Foraker's Highway of Diamonds. To support his climbing habit, he did odd jobs, selling suits at J.C. Penney, working as a chain hand on oilrigs on the Overthrust Belt in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah, and leading trips for the Colorado Outward Bound School.

Udall mentions one incident in particular. In 1980, he was at a base camp near Denali, preparing to climb nearby Mount Foraker. Almost two weeks earlier, Metcalf and two climbing partners left to attempt a daring first-ever alpine-style ascent on the 14,000-foot Mount Hunter. They were traveling light, with only six days' worth of food. Twelve days had passed since a bush pilot had dropped them on the glacier at the foot of Hunter's south face.

"People had begun to think they had met their end on the mountain," Udall recalls. "The only way to get off of that route was to go over the (mountain's) top. It was impossible to rappel back down once they were on the route."

But the next day, "these guys stumbled into camp looking like skeletons," Udall says. Their climb (which one of Metcalf's climbing partners, Glenn Randall, later described in a book called Breaking Point) was "a metaphor for Peter as a businessman," Udall says. "He's going up and over the top."

----

In 1982, Metcalf landed a job as the general manager of Chouinard Equipment, a company that made rock-climbing safety equipment. It was founded by legendary climber and entrepreneur Yvon Chouinard, a notorious nonconformist whose business philosophy is summed up in the title of his 2005 memoir/manifesto, Let My People Go Surfing.

Today, Chouinard remembers Metcalf as "probably the first guy we ever hired who had any business degree." Actually, Metcalf earned that degree while working for Chouinard, going to school at night and on weekends.

Under Metcalf's leadership, Chouinard Equipment grew quickly, but in 1989, faced with lawsuits over his climbing gear, unable to get meaningful insurance, and wanting to protect his rapidly growing outdoor clothing company, Patagonia, Chouinard put his equipment company into bankruptcy. Metcalf says the climbing community was at a crisis point: Without well-made gear, climbers flirted with catastrophe, and landowners and government agencies, spooked by liability lawsuits, were shutting down access to crags across the country.

"Climbing is more than a sport," Metcalf says. "It's about athleticism and adventure. It's also about learning to trust in your fellow individual. It's the brotherhood, the community of the rope. And it's about the sublime landscapes in which you ply your craft."

Metcalf and a handful of other dedicated employees scraped together enough money to buy the faltering business' assets. He renamed the company Black Diamond and made risk management, certification, and rigorous safety testing its centerpieces. These, combined with clearly written labels that instructed buyers about proper equipment use and the inherent risks of climbing, helped win legal protection for outdoor-gear companies. Climbing areas began to re-open, and the sport exploded in popularity.

Today, Black Diamond is a $150 million-a-year publicly traded company with more than 600 employees, about half of whom are in Utah and the rest scattered across the globe. "When I first started here, it was one step up from a garage shop," says the company's director of quality, an amiable Canuck named Kolin "KP" Powick. "When new people would arrive, it used to be, 'Welcome. Run down to the D.I. (thrift shop) and get yourself a desk and chair.' Now it truly is a global company."

Black Diamond's growth brought political clout, as Metcalf discovered when he first stood up to Gov. Leavitt, then worked with the governor and his successors to protect Utah's public lands. He and other outdoor-industry leaders helped shape the Washington County Lands Bill, which protected 256,000 acres of red-rock wilderness. They convinced Jon Huntsman, who was elected governor in 2005, to drop a plan to strip protection from roadless areas on the state's national forests.

They also helped hold the line on energy development around Desolation and Gray canyons. Following the fateful flight in the governor's plane in 2004, Gov. Walker joined them in challenging the BLM's plans to lease lands near Desolation for oil and gas drilling. Before Huntsman was appointed ambassador to China in 2009, he even talked about seeking permanent wild and scenic river protection for the canyon.

"For a period of time here, people were talking about the importance of the active outdoor industry, the importance of public lands, and how outdoor recreation can't be mixed up with just generic tourism," Metcalf says. "It seemed like people were listening to what we were saying -- like it mattered."

In the 1980s, "active recreation" was the outdoor sports industry's scruffy little brother. It consisted of a passel of small companies, largely founded by backcountry aficionados: climbers, backpackers, and whitewater boaters, many of whom started businesses in garages, making their gear by hand.

The industry's first weak attempts at a trade show came during the annual Ski Industry of America show, which packs the Las Vegas Convention Center with the latest skis, boots and high-tech clothing. The backcountry crowd held its sideshow at the Tropicana out on the Strip. The first official Outdoor Retailer or "OR" Show was held in 1989 in the basement of the Hilton in Reno, Nev. It grew steadily, if slowly, there until 1996, when Peter Metcalf helped bring it to Salt Lake City.

Since then, the business has ballooned. The OR show has swelled into a mammoth bazaar that jams the Salt Palace convention center with more than 2,000 companies and 40,000 people. It holds two events each year, one in winter and one in summer, racking up an estimated $40 million a year in direct spending in Salt Lake City. The Outdoor Industry Association, which sponsors the show, now includes more than a thousand member companies, ranging from equipment manufacturers like Black Diamond and The North Face to Backpacker magazine and the makers of Clif Bar.

Still, in 2003, when Metcalf wrote Gov. Leavitt threatening to pull the OR show out of Salt Lake, he was going out on a limb. He wasn't on the Outdoor Industry Association's board at the time (though he would be shortly thereafter), so he was making a threat he couldn't actually carry out –– at least not by himself. "That letter caused a question about whether the industry felt this way or just Peter," says the association's president and CEO, Frank Hugelmeyer, who got his start hawking outdoor equipment at New York City's iconic gear shop, Paragon Sports. "The papers called us, and I said, 'Yeah, the industry does feel this way.' That started the real firestorm. Now you had an industry position."

Together, Metcalf and Hugelmeyer sat down with Leavitt, building their case that the outdoor industry was a key economic player in the West -- and that wide-open spaces were critical to sustaining it. Slowly, they began to reframe the discussion about public lands from one of jobs-versus-the environment to a more nuanced discussion that involved both jobs and the environment. "It changed the conversation here," says Scott Groene, executive director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. "I think it has drifted down to a common understanding that there's an economic value to protecting places."

But even as they seemed to be succeeding on the state level, nationally, the industry wasn't gaining traction. Hugelmeyer recalls huddling with colleagues over drinks at the Hyatt in Washington, D.C., after a frustrating day of lobbying on Capitol Hill in 2004. "In the halls of Congress, we were still being treating as tree-huggers," he says. "I remember saying, 'We need to quantify this -- the real true impact of outdoor recreation.'"

The notes they scribbled on a napkin that evening would inspire two years of work, funded by the equipment giant REI, aimed at putting a price tag on active outdoor recreation nationwide. The resulting report, The Active Outdoor Recreation Economy, published in 2006, estimated that, all told, the outdoor business generated an astronomical $730 billion annually, supporting 6.5 million jobs and touching more than one in every 12 dollars circulating in the economy.

The figure included everything from gear manufacturing and sales to hotel rooms and restaurants, but if you start throwing numbers like that around, politicians' ears perk up, says Craig Mackey, the Outdoor Industry Association's director of recreation policy. "That report has gained us an enormous amount of traction in Washington, D.C., and beyond."

----

Today, the Outdoor Industry Association is far from a K Street powerhouse, but in the six years since the Recreation Economy report came out, Hugelmeyer and Co. have become familiar faces in the nation's capital. The association brings CEOs and other representatives to Washington once a year to meet with White House officials, congressional representatives and agency bigwigs. The industry has even created its own Political Action Committee that, since 2008, has funneled a small amount of money -- between $14,000 and $30,000 a year -- into the campaigns of sympathetic politicians.

The lobbying, economic numbers and donations have opened doors. The association has collaborated with the feds on "America's Great Outdoors," President Obama's initiative to get more people outside. Hugelmeyer and others regularly appear at press conferences with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who frequently cites the association's numbers in his speeches. And in April, the White House gave Hugelmeyer a Champion of Change award for his work promoting environmentally and socially responsible business practices.

The outdoor industry has used its newfound clout to advance trade rules that benefit the great majority of its members who manufacture their backpacks, water bottles and other gear overseas. It has also pushed for conservation in the West and beyond. The association has acted as muscle for environmental groups, lobbying for basic funding for state and federal land management agencies and the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which pushes royalties from offshore oil drilling into the purchase of key public lands and waterways.

The association's sister organization, the Conservation Alliance, works along a parallel track. Created in 1989, the alliance collects membership dues from gear companies, then pours that money into grassroots conservation initiatives, mostly aimed at protecting wilderness areas and wild rivers popular with recreationists (see map at hcn.org). In recent years, the organization has also stepped up its lobbying efforts, holding training sessions for its board members in Washington, D.C., and meeting with congressional representatives on the bills and issues that the alliance funds.

"The outdoor recreation industry has really grown in stature and is becoming very influential," says Jamie Williams, president of The Wilderness Society. "It's one thing for conservation groups to talk about the values of public lands, but to have industry leaders come forward to talk about how important sustaining these lands is -- these are jobs that are sustainable and can't be exported. It's not boom or bust."

The biggest win to date for the Conservation Alliance and its allies came in 2009, when President Obama signed the Omnibus Public Lands Act, protecting more than 2 million acres of new wilderness, more than 1,000 miles of newly designated wild and scenic rivers, and expanding the national parks and monuments system. The Alliance had given more than $700,000 to 13 grassroots organizations whose local campaigns inspired protections in the omnibus bill. It sent delegations to Washington to lobby on behalf of these groups, and wrote a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi –– signed by 36 industry leaders and CEOs –– in support of the bill.

The alliance's executive director, John Sterling, is the first to acknowledge that the outdoor industry was a bit player in a much larger drama. Still, he says, it performed a necessary role in getting economic issues into the debate. Sens. Barbara Boxer and Ron Wyden both cited the Recreation Economy study in speeches supporting the bill.

That same year, the U.S. House of Representatives, nudged by the outdoor industry, approved $900 million for the Land and Water Conservation Fund. Had it passed the Senate, it would have been only the third time since the program was created, in 1965, that it had received its full federal allocation. But soon, everything changed.

The 2010 elections, which swept anti-government, anti-conservation Tea Party Republicans into power in the U.S. House of Representatives, hit Utah particularly hard: Republicans threw out three-term incumbent Sen. Bob Bennett during the state GOP convention. Bennett had sponsored the Washington County Lands Bill, and stood over the president's shoulder as he signed the Omnibus Public Lands Act. In his place, Utah elected Mike Lee, who last year earned a 27 percent rating from the League of Conservation Voters.

In a special election the same year, Huntsman's lieutenant governor, Gary Herbert, landed in the governor's seat. Herbert, a realtor who received campaign contributions from a coal company and road builders, rekindled Utah's road fight last December, announcing plans to lay claim to more than 19,000 miles of rights of way across public lands. In March, he signed an audacious bill demanding that the federal government cede 22 million acres of national forest and BLM land to the state. The Utah Legislature set aside $3 million for a legal showdown. Herbert also signed a bill limiting public access to rivers that cross private lands -- infuriating anglers and boaters -- and voiced his support for a ski area expansion vehemently opposed by Metcalf and other backcountry recreationists.

The news from Washington, D.C., was little better. Last June, Interior Secretary Salazar reversed his "wild lands" protection policy -- which he'd publicly unveiled at a press conference just six months previously, flanked by Hugelmeyer and Metcalf. Wilderness bills were sent spiraling back into the holding pattern of the last couple decades, while President Obama traveled the country singing the praises of domestic energy production. In March, the administration gave its initial blessing to a Denver company's proposal for extensive natural gas drilling spread across more than 200,000 acres of federal land rising up the West Tavaputs Plateau toward Desolation Canyon. Gov. Herbert added his enthusiastic support.

Then, on March 25, in response to a string of editorials Peter Metcalf had published in The Salt Lake Tribune slamming the governor's anti-conservation actions, Herbert replied with his own ultimatum. "If you are interested in finding practical, pragmatic solutions to public lands issues, I welcome your constructive input," Herbert wrote. "If after thoughtful consideration, you determine you cannot work in a spirit of collaboration, then I would expect your resignation from the working group" -- the Ski and Snowboard Industry Working Group within the Governor's Office of Economic Development.

Suddenly, the outdoor industry's ability to advance protection for public lands was in serious question. Meanwhile, Metcalf himself was in a free fall.

----

With all of the industry's gains teetering precariously, a debate that its leaders had been having "around the kitchen table," as one CEO puts it, became more urgent: What was the best course of action? Should the industry focus, laser-like, on protecting wilderness, wild lands and wild rivers? Or should it try to build new, broader-based partnerships with nontraditional bedfellows, including motorized groups, in an effort to win more political sway on issues such as parks and recreation funding, favorable trade regulations and the likes?

Metcalf argues for renewed focus. In a hostile political climate, he says, it is all the more important to stay true to the cause -- protecting what he praises as the West's "iconic" wild landscapes.

Hugelmeyer's vision is both pragmatic and more expansive. He agrees that taking a strong stand has been good for the association, and vows not to back down on protecting wilderness areas and roadless forests. But he sees the association as the champion of a "national recreation system" that encompasses everything from city parks and bike paths to remote wilderness areas. "We're for the full spectrum," he says.

That full spectrum includes motorized recreation. To further his group's aims, Hugelmeyer is willing to work with ATV and snowmobiler groups and even extractive industries. "I don't know anybody who walks to the trailhead," he says. "Our fleece and kayaks have petroleum products in them." And this is where the divide begins to get serious.

"That path could be very problematic for hunters, anglers and the conservation community," says one longtime environmental insider. "If the outdoor industry and motorized and extractive groups agree that, say, 20 percent of roadless areas should remain roadless, and the rest should be opened to development, what politician isn't going to stand up and say, 'Great. I can go with that.' "

The debate sheds light on the fracture lines inside the still-young outdoor industry. The overall economic numbers are impressive, but the industry itself still consists of thousands of small players -- gear manufacturers, river guiding companies, outdoor shops, motels and gas stations. That puts the industry at a political disadvantage compared to oil and gas, which is dominated by huge corporations, and it opens the industry to infighting. The Portland-based shoe company KEEN, for example, got an angry letter a few years back from the International Mountain Bicyling Association over its support for a wilderness bill on Mount Hood. (Mountain bikes are not permitted in wilderness areas.)

But the outdoor industry's biggest weakness boils down to participation. The 1,300-member Outdoor Industry Association represents only a tiny fraction of the industry as a whole. The Conservation Alliance claims only about 200 members, and last year it gave away just over $1 million, generally in $30,000 chunks to groups such as American Whitewater, Earthjustice, Montana Wilderness Association and the Wyoming Outdoor Council. This year, it has budgeted $1.2 million. "We're proud of the fact that we represent the outdoor industry's collective commitment," Sterling says. "But that really is chump change compared to what the oil and gas industry is able to contribute to projects we're always fighting."

Yvon Chouinard is more blunt. His company, Patagonia, has given away close to $50 million to environmental causes over the years, and he co-founded a coalition called 1% for the Planet whose member companies tithe a portion of their sales to environmental groups. "It's a great disappointment to me that the outdoor industry hasn't stepped up more," says Chouinard. "There are 1,500 members of 1% for the Planet. Very few are members of the outdoor industry. It's pretty disgraceful."

Certainly, some companies have their own conservation programs. Many sponsor trail days and tree plantings. A few campaign to protect wild places. But political power comes from working in numbers, with a strong sense of unity, rather than by each company simply doing its own little bit.

"We're all pretty immature companies," says Steve Barker, the founder and longtime CEO of Eagle Creek, a company that makes backpacks and luggage. "We're running around trying to get the cattle heading the right way, while the oil and gas industry is organized, on message, pounding it home to us three times a night on TV."

In early May, Peter Metcalf was still mulling over his response to Gov. Herbert's letter. If there was any possibility of some sort of "coalition government," as Metcalf put it, he wanted to remain a part of it. But every sign he'd received suggested that the "collaboration" the governor spoke of in his letter amounted to Herbert's way or the highway.

Metcalf was inclined to light out for the highway, but he knew that his response would make a statement about the position of the larger outdoor industry in Western conservation debates. Should he go quietly back to the bargaining table to try to negotiate a stronger voice for the recreation economy –– or come out swinging, resign and take the whole feud public?

As Metcalf considered, word hit the newspapers that the Outdoor Retailer Show might be looking for a new home anyway. There simply wasn't enough space at the Salt Palace to accommodate the growing number of vendors, and Salt Lake City's hotels overflowed during the summer show, forcing some attendees to book rooms as far away as Provo, 45 miles away.

Metcalf says a move had been under discussion for several years. This time around, however, something had changed. In the past, Metcalf was among a vocal group within the industry who argued for keeping the show in Salt Lake, simply because they felt that it gave them power to affect Utah's public policy. "In the last nine to 12 months, that group's voice, including my own, just died," he says. "If this is the impact we are having with Herbert, we don't need an impact."

Metcalf told Salt Lake Tribune reporters this in mid-May, but once again his words seemed to backfire. In a Tribune article, Herbert spokeswoman Ally Isom claimed that politics were irrelevant to the Outdoor Retailers' decision to look elsewhere, and accused Metcalf of using the moment to "misrepresent fact for personal agendas." (Isom didn't use Metcalf's name, but it was clear who she was talking about.)

"That was the tipping point," Metcalf says. "I can be more effective speaking up publicly in a thoughtful way than working under the illusion that I'm somehow a confidant of the governor, who will listen to me only if I don't publicly challenge him."

----

On June 9, Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire stood at a podium at a posh golf resort in the Cascade Mountains foothills and announced the rollout of the most recent iteration of the Outdoor Industry Association's economic impact numbers. Gregoire, the outgoing chair of the Western Governors' Association, had signed the group on as a sponsor and partner in the study. Standing next to her was REI President and CEO Sally Jewell. Gov. Herbert, Western Governors' co-chair, was there too, along with two other new partners, representing the motorcycle and powerboat industries.

The new numbers were not quite as impressive as the ones in the original Recreation Economy study, but they were far from negligible. The report estimated that Americans spent $645 billion on outdoor recreation in 2011, dwarfing pharmaceuticals, cars, fuel and household utilities. Nearly 40 percent of that spending –– $255 billion –– was in the West, where 2.3 million outdoor-related jobs brought in $110 billion in salaries, wages and business income and more than $30 billion in state and federal taxes. "Breathtaking," Gregoire gushed. "This is one of the best industries we have in this country."

Earlier in the afternoon, Herbert had boasted to the assembled crowd that Utah was proud to be home to climbing gear companies such as Black Diamond and the Outdoor Retailers Show -- "the largest convention in the state." But when a reporter suggested that his public-lands policies had put him at odds with some in the industry, and might well lose him the OR show, he was dismissive. "Maybe you know something I don't," he said, rolling into a speech about how Utah's preponderance of public lands puts it at an economic disadvantage. Recreation, he said firmly, needs to be balanced with development.

Once the questions ended, Gregoire quickly swung the gathering back on message. "The story of the day is $645 billion," she said. "We plan to communicate that to every member of Congress."

How the industry would leverage that number for conservation was unclear. Earlier in the day, Jewell had talked about her company's work on "bike paths, trails, wildlife corridors and connected habitats," only to be upstaged by Bennett Morgan, president and COO of Polaris, who blasted a hard-rocking video of motorcyclists, dirt bikers and snowmobilers bombing around the Western wilds. He urged the crowd to push for more motorized access to public lands. And at the press conference, Herbert was all too eager to show where his heart lay. "Too much is going to non-motorized use," he said. "The demand is growing for off-road use, but there are fewer and fewer acres open for it."

If the debate was simply about recreation versus development, then recreation certainly still had a seat at the table. But beyond that, it seemed that people were free to use the numbers to advance whatever agenda they saw fit.

Three weeks after the Western Governors' Association meeting, Peter Metcalf sent Gov. Herbert his resignation letter. "Many outdoor industry leaders perceive your administration's statements and positions regarding federal lands in Utah as highly detrimental to our interests and concerns, and some as outright hostile," he wrote. "I will continue to advocate on issues affecting public lands as part of a respectful, 'loyal opposition' in which our two camps may yet find points of agreement."

In early July, Metcalf went public with the resignation, sending out a press release excoriating the governor for promoting policies that "are hostile to the interests of the outdoor industry and ignore sizable contributions to the state's economy."

With the summer OR show convening Aug. 2, the question once again becomes whether the outdoor industry will stand behind Metcalf, or let him become a lone voice in the wilderness. On July 10, he sent Hugelmeyer and the Outdoor Industry Association's board chair, Eastern Mountain Sports CEO Will Manzer, an email challenging the association to use the OR show to take Gov. Herbert and Utah's Republican congressional delegation to task. "Failure to do so makes the industry complicit in the most extreme anti-outdoor industry/anti-federal lands stewardship policies in the country," he wrote.

At press time, there was no word on what, if any, fireworks await when the OR Show meets in a few short weeks -- or whether the show will stay in Utah. Metcalf, meanwhile, is adjusting his strategy to meet his state's new realities. He may no longer sit at the governor's table, or ride in his plane, but he can still work with politicians like Rep. Jim Matheson, the state's only congressional Democrat, and the progressive mayors of Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County. And he can continue to shine the spotlight on the state's leaders when they undermine public lands protection. "We're kind of like a Chinese dissident in China," he says. "We keep drawing attention to this place."

And while Metcalf is concerned about what he sees as a lack of commitment and activism from others in his industry, he says he still finds hope in wild places, and in the people who seek them out. "There are moments in climbing where you manage to work through a crux, you're on a big climb and you find a ledge you can fit two cheeks of your ass on, and you say, 'Thank God.' It creates a level of sensitivity and appreciation for the littlest things -- so much so that the big environments are unbelievable to you," he says.

]]>No publisherPublic LandsRecreation2012/07/30 02:00:00 GMT-6ArticleDueling Letters: Utah's Governor versus Black Diamond's CEOhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/44.12/can-the-outdoor-gear-industry-wield-its-power-for-conservation/dueling-letters-utahs-governor-versus-black-diamonds-ceo
In March 2012, Black Diamond CEO Peter Metcalf wrote an op-ed in the Salt Lake Tribune criticizing Utah Governor Gary Herbert for supporting legislation that would transfer ownership of federal public lands to the state of Utah and potentially open up protected wild lands to motorized recreation and energy developers. Soon after, the governor wrote a terse letter to Metcalf, challenging him for his antagonism and accusing him of having a "mindless ideological agenda." Metcalf then responded with a letter of his own, in which he announced that he is quitting the governor's Ski and Snowboard Industry Working Group. Read the op-ed and the two letters here (click the magnifying glass at the bottom of each document to zoom in):
Peter Metcalf's March op-ed in the Salt Lake Tribune

]]>No publisherRecreation2012/07/23 02:00:00 GMT-6ArticleConservation Alliance Grants, 2011-2012http://www.hcn.org/issues/44.12/can-the-outdoor-gear-industry-wield-its-power-for-conservation/conservation-alliance-grants-2011-2012
A map showing the grants given by the Outdoor Industry Association's sister organization, the Conservation Alliance.In 1989, four outdoor companies – REI, Patagonia, The North Face and Kelty – founded the Conservation Alliance to increase industry support for efforts to protect wildlands used by recreationists. Since then the alliance has grown to include more than 180 member companies and has disbursed more than $10 million in membership dues to conservation groups. In 2012, the Alliance plans to contribute $1.3 million to a variety of campaigns. This map shows a handful of the more than 50 grants awarded in 2011 and 2012. For a complete list, visit conservationalliance.com/grants.]]>No publisherRecreationInfographic2012/07/23 02:00:00 GMT-6ArticleA decade of difficult questionshttp://www.hcn.org/issues/334/16685
Outgoing High Country News editor Greg
Hanscom muses on the stories and issues the paper has covered in
the 10 years he’s been with itCall it divine justice. Last month, I missed my plane
home from a High Country News board meeting in
Missoula, Mont. (It’s a long story; suffice it to say that
the Rattlesnake Wilderness is lovely this time of year.) On a
flight early the next morning, I found myself sitting next to none
other than Lynn Scarlett, the deputy secretary of the U.S.
Department of Interior.

I’d never met Scarlett in
person, but I’d spoken to her on the phone a few years
before, when I was working on a story about a team of Forest
Service employees whose jobs had been outsourced to private
contractors. In the story, I’d given Scarlett her say, but
I’d also gone out of my way to expose what I believed to be
her real agenda: emasculating federal environmental agencies in
order to turn their duties over to corporations.

There I
was — a guy who had done my best, for almost a decade, to
force HCN readers into some pretty agonizing
conversations about the West — caught in a surprise encounter
with a woman I believed to be my nemesis. And I had not yet had a
drop of coffee. I would have killed to be able to call the office
and have somebody beam me back.

Scarlett asked that I not
share the conversation with readers, and admittedly, it was too
early in the morning for official quotes. But I will say that, as
we jetted over the vast gas fields of western Wyoming, we found
more areas of agreement than I ever would have imagined.

And as I caught my connecting flight to Grand Junction, the
conversation set me to reflecting on this institution, and its role
in fostering discussion about the West.

My early days at
HCN were heady times. Bill Clinton was in the
White House and Bruce Babbitt, a conservationist and a Westerner,
was in charge of the Interior Department. The political and
economic tides seemed to have turned against the mining, timber and
agricultural interests — Charles Wilkinson’s "lords of
yesterday" — that had long ruled the region. The mood here
was ebullient. We were journalists, but
HCN’s roots are in the environmental
movement, and we still had the well-being of the land at heart.

In the late 1990s, we blazed headlines across the cover
such as "The Old West is Going Under" and "A New Road for the
Public Lands." We proclaimed the end of the Age of Dams and a truce
in the Timber Wars. Sure, there were still bad things afoot:
Motorheads tore up the deserts, condos sprawled through the high
country, and we were seeing the pesky beginnings of a natural gas
boom. But we dared to dream that, having dispensed with the old
fights, we could begin putting our ravaged region back together.

We ran stories about efforts to restore forests and
rangelands, heal the scars left by mining, and bring back wolves
and other native wildlife. Most dramatic were the stories about
reviving rivers: With a friendly administration in Washington,
proposals to drain Lake Powell and tear out dams on the Snake River
didn’t seem all that far-fetched.

It was telling,
though, that unlike much of the environmental movement, which was
doing its best to pound the final nails in the Old West’s
coffin, HCN paused and took a thoughtful step
back. We asked whether the New West was such a great thing after
all. And we looked at the conservation coup with questioning,
critical eyes.

Part of our coverage of the effort to
drain Lake Powell was a long essay about why Glen Canyon Dam
— that great icon of evil for environmentalists — had
saved the Interior West from rapid development. And when Paul
Larmer, now HCN’s publisher, wrote about
Clinton’s surprise declaration of the 1.7 million-acre Grand
Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah, we asked
the locals to tell us their side of the story. Many
conservationists were furious.

Part of our reasoning was
that Ed and Betsy Marston, HCN’s longtime
publisher-editor team, had seen the winds of Washington change
before. They believed that if Westerners didn’t buy into
conservation, it would be short-lived. The old fights would flare
up again as soon as the winds turned. Besides, it just seemed right
to give local people a say.

We also believed that the
environmental movement had become a strong and lasting presence in
the region. It no longer needed a cheerleader. More than anything,
the movement, and the West, needed clear-eyed honesty.

So
even as we covered the big conservation victories — the
national monuments and the roadless area protections — we
also turned our attention to small-scale, local efforts to find
compromise. In 1996, staff writer Lisa Jones kicked off
HCN’s pioneering coverage of collaborative
land management with her cover story, "Howdy, Neighbor!" What
followed was a long string of stories about ranchers, loggers,
environmentalists and developers sitting down together to find
common ground. These were not sexy stories — it’s tough
to make cooperation sound exciting — but we believed that
inclusive, on-the-ground solutions were, in many ways, more
important to the West.

----

And we ran stories that were
skeptical — sometimes critical — of the environmental
movement. I wrote a cover story about the visionary Wildlands
Project, which was inspiring a new generation of conservationists
— and sparking fear, loathing and downright hatred from many
rural residents. HCN Northern Rockies Editor Ray
Ring wrote about Montana enviros who had become separated from the
diverse allies that once made them a powerful, progressive force.

We lost readers for telling these stories, but we were
determined to ask the tough questions.

The winds in
Washington did change, of course — though it took us a while
to realize just how dramatically. The wholesale rollbacks of
environmental rules and the large-scale leasing of the landscape
for energy development made the Clinton days seem like a romantic
dream. By 2003, HCN was running regular stories about the Bush
administration’s meddling with science and natural resource
policy.

Our readers reacted strongly to our early
coverage of the administration, some complaining that we’d
become too "lefty" and biased. A brief mention of this reaction in
the "Dear Friends" column elicited a blizzard of letters —
some supportive, some biting. The message came through loud and
clear: Our readers wanted solid, accurate reporting above all else,
and they didn’t want us to lose track of the grassroots
efforts that had inspired so many hopes.

We continued to
watch Washington, but we tried to do it in a smarter and sharper
way. Freelance writer Kathie Durbin’s cover story about the
Biscuit Fire salvage project in Oregon showed that the Forest
Service had tried to act responsibly, but that field staffers had
been steamrolled by vengeful higher-ups. Her story about
Bush’s Healthy Forests Initiative again called into question
the sincerity of officials in Washington, pointing out that they
were crediting their new "streamlined" rules with progress that had
been made under the old ones.

With conservationists once
more on the defensive, we refused to give up our role as their
fiercest friend. We celebrated the 40th anniversary of the
Wilderness Act, not with a dewy-eyed remembrance of the brave
wilderness warriors of the past, but with a hard-nosed essay by
Associate Editor Matt Jenkins laying out the real political
compromises needed to protect wilderness.

At times, it
must seem like our sole purpose is to make our readers
uncomfortable. But we do it for a reason: We want to understand the
path the West is on, and do our part to help the region find its
way to a better future. We want to help the West thrive in the long
term, less vulnerable to economic booms and busts and changing
political winds. And we believe that this will only happen if we
continue to think hard, ask difficult questions, and foster
energetic and honest discussion with people we don’t
necessarily agree with.

Lynn Scarlett did agree to talk
with me "on the record" a few weeks after our surprise encounter.
And while she wasn’t half as candid as she’d been that
morning on the plane, there were a few things that we could agree
on publicly. One of those things is the importance of local
solutions: She’s pushed hard in the past few years to force
federal employees to work more productively with local people.

I told her that I had a hard time taking the talk of
cooperation seriously when the administration had so clearly put
energy development ahead of all else, including public opinion.
We’d flown over the physical manifestation of this policy in
western Wyoming, which is riddled with roads and well pads.

She gave me the party line about balancing development
with conservation, and "ensuring that we can warm our homes, drive
our cars to go see our grandmothers and grandfathers …" I
wanted to gag. But then she let her guard down, for just a moment.

Much of the energy development now under way is the
result of leases sold under previous administrations, she said; the
real implications of the Bush administration’s leasing spree
have yet to be realized. "We’re concerned," she said. And I
believe she meant it.

No, the Old West isn’t dead.
Energy markets have given it a new lease on life, and the Bush
administration has accelerated and extended it, ensuring that the
boom will continue for decades to come. But I found a little
consolation in the fact that even some within the administration
realize that their "winner takes all" attitude hasn’t been
the best thing for the region. Perhaps there’s some hope that
we will be able to cushion the impact of the growing energy boom,
and that, some day, we’ll be able to set our differences
aside and work together for a saner, more sustainable West.

]]>No publisherPoliticsEssaysArticleDear friendshttp://www.hcn.org/issues/334/16677
HCN says goodbye to Greg Hanscom and
welcomes new editor John Mecklin; notes from readersCHANGING OF THE GUARD
High Country News is bidding goodbye to editor
Greg Hanscom and welcoming new editor
John Mecklin.

Mecklin got his start in
journalism in 1978 as a reporter for the twice-a-week
Williamson County Sun in rural Texas. Later, as
a reporter for the Houston Post, he traveled to
Saudi Arabia and Iraq to cover the first Persian Gulf War. Since
1993, he has edited alternative news weeklies — first
New Times in Phoenix, and then the San
Francisco Weekly. There, he specialized in groundbreaking
investigative stories.

"Fallout," a multi-part series he
edited, covered the checkered and often frightening history of the
Hunters Point Shipyard. The Navy wanted to hand the shipyard over
to the city of San Francisco for residential and commercial
development. But 13 months of reporting and a mountain of
declassified documents revealed that the Navy had used the shipyard
to do all manner of experiments with highly radioactive material,
leaving a mess that it didn’t dare look at, much less clean
up. The stories stopped the development proposal in its tracks,
says Mecklin, and won "just about every major journalism award,
except a Pulitzer."

What are his plans for High
Country News? For starters, he says, he’ll focus on
finding stories that are in keeping with
HCN’s traditional coverage. There will
inevitably be changes, but he expects them to be gradual, and he is
determined to hang on to the independent, intelligent spirit that
first impressed him about the paper when he stumbled upon it in the
early 1990s. "High Country News is really good
already," he says, "and it’s just poised and waiting to be
that much better."

He urges readers to contact him with
comments — or complaints — at john@hcn.org.

NOTES FROM READERS

Tom
Ward, California policy director for the International
Mountain Bicycling Association, writes that HCN
Editor Greg Hanscom quoted him out of context in a Sept. 18
editorial. Ward asked the author of the issue’s cover story,
Patrick Farrell, "Why am I arguing for (mountain bike access to)
this postage stamp when I’ve got the rest for people to
ride?" He says he was speaking "only in the context of
California’s current wilderness bills — not
IMBA’s broader policies, as Hanscom suggests. In short, I
fully support IMBA’s ongoing work on wilderness issues."

Agustin Goba, a former ’zine
publisher from Snowmass Village, Colo., wrote with "just a bit of
nit-picking" regarding the Oct. 2 story, "Sweet Simplicity." "It
states that ’zines have their roots in punk rock and
anarchist culture," says Goba. "Actually, those punk rock and
anarchist ’zines had their roots in even earlier
’zines, namely the fanzines put out by the hundreds, if not
thousands, by science fiction fans, going back to at least the
1940s."

And Ben Beach, senior editor
at The Wilderness Society, responded to our Sept. 4 story,
"Reborn," which described nuclear power advocate Patrick Moore as a
Greenpeace founder. Beach says Moore was among the 12 people aboard
Greenpeace’s first protest ship, and that he calls himself a
founder, but "he is not one of the three founding members."

]]>No publisherDear FriendsColoradoArticleGood work in Washingtonhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/332/16616
The Bush administration deserves credit for its "Water
2025" initiative, which provided grants that have helped the
Deschutes River Conservancy and the Central Oregon Irrigation
District begin restoring Oregon’s Deschutes RiverSeven years ago, I climbed aboard my aging Toyota
Tercel and headed south through a blizzard so strong that it packed
my wheel wells with ice. To keep the tires turning, I had to stop
at small-town car washes and blast the ice blocks out with hot
water.

It was the first of many trips I made to southern
Colorado, New Mexico and the U.S.-Mexico border to research a
series of stories about the Rio Grande. On maps, the Rio Grande is
a thin blue line that runs from Colorado’s San Juan Mountains
all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. On the ground, the blue is even
thinner: In several places, humans have dried up the poor river
altogether. Like a worm carved up by an enterprising 4-year-old, it
still wriggles in places — and even shimmers from time to
time. But it is far from the "Great River" of its name.

In this issue, we offer an alternative to that sad story. So many
of the West’s rivers are in trouble these days. But in
Oregon, as Matt Jenkins, HCN’s West Coast
correspondent, writes, a truly radical community effort is bringing
the Deschutes River back to life.

As Matt says, the
credit for this work goes largely to the local people on the
ground, who have set aside their fears and frustrations, taken a
clear-eyed look at the future, and jumped in feet-first. But in the
interest of giving credit where it is due, I must also applaud the
Bush administration.

Over the past six years, these pages
have carried plenty of stories about how the White House has
sabotaged environmental protections and torpedoed local
conservation efforts. With water, the administration’s record
is spotty. The feds have allowed a visionary restoration effort on
the San Francisco Bay-Delta to founder. And in the Colorado River
Basin, they have basically bowed out of the debate over Las
Vegas’ plans to build a massive groundwater-pumping project
— a project that could have serious impacts on a national
park, three wildlife refuges, and a host of rural farming and
ranching communities.

But there’s good news, too.
Early in her term, former Interior Secretary Gale Norton held
California to the strict water diet imposed by her predecessor,
Bruce Babbitt. And in 2003, Norton kicked off the "Water 2025"
initiative, an effort to look down the road a ways and avoid water
crisis and conflict. Since then, the Interior Department has doled
out millions of dollars for projects focused on water conservation,
efficiency and water marketing.

One of the grants went to
the Deschutes River Conservancy and the Central Oregon Irrigation
District, which poured the $250,000 into a far-sighted planning
effort. The feds have also funded the conservancy — to the
tune of about a half million dollars last year — and provided
start-up money for a first-of-its kind water bank, which shuttles
water from farms to cities, and back into the river, without the
usual pitfalls of unbridled water markets. Each of these efforts is
a small piece in a very large puzzle, but they’re all
revolutionary in their own way.

Kudos to the people in
Washington, D.C., for putting their weight behind a grassroots
effort that offers hope for the West’s beaten-down rivers,
from the Deschutes to the Rio Grande. Here’s hoping we see a
lot more of the same in the future.

]]>No publisherWaterPoliticsColorado RiverEditor's noteWriters on the RangeArticleLeave the wheels out of wildernesshttp://www.hcn.org/issues/330/16536
As enjoyable as mountain biking is, bikes simply
don’t belong in the wilderness, partly because the faster you
travel through a place, the smaller – and tamer – that
place begins to seem.A few winters back, a buddy of mine did a lot of backcountry skiing. So much skiing, in fact, that he was convinced he’d discovered a new law of physics: "The faster you go," he told me, "the farther apart the trees become." This is your brain. This is your brain on skis.

"There’s a corollary," I responded. "The faster you go, the harder the trees become. Perhaps it’s time to invest in a helmet."

Maybe I’m also influenced by "outdoorphins," as another friend calls them, but I’ve come up with a theory of my own: The faster you go — whether on skis, foot or mountain bike — the smaller a place becomes.

Take the time to walk through the wilderness, and it will feel endless. Trade your heavy pack and boots for a water bottle and a pair of running shoes, and the ground starts to fly away under your feet; the place doesn’t seem as vast as it did. Jump on a mountain bike, and the world becomes smaller still. And it shrinks not just for you, but also for the folks you share it with: They’re privy to your echoing hoots of joy; they have to be ready to jump off the trail when you come hurtling past. Gleeful and courteous though you might be, it takes you just an hour to race over ground they might give an entire day to exploring, and that knowledge somehow changes the shape of the experience.

I’m a trail runner and a cross-country skier, and I’ve been riding mountain bikes since I was a high school kid in the 1980s. I understand the magic of motion, the rush you get from speed.

But all these experiences have led me to conclude that there have to be some limits. When we travel in wilderness areas, I think we should leave our mountain bikes behind. For me, the issue isn’t about the definition of "mechanized transport," or other legal hairsplitting regarding the 1964 Wilderness Act. I just believe that, in a world where wildlands are shrinking daily and it’s tougher all the time to find real solitude, there ought to be a few places that we consent to move through slowly — places that we allow to stay as big, and quiet, as they once were.

The International Mountain Bicycling Association (IMBA) has wisely refrained from fighting for bike access to existing wilderness areas. Nonetheless, many of its members, and even staffers, believe that they should be able to ride in wilderness. And IMBA continues to thrust itself into negotiations over protecting new wilderness areas, insisting that bikes aren’t shut out of trails.

Not everyone at IMBA thinks these battles are worth the trouble. Tom Ward, the group’s California representative, would rather IMBA used its energy to fight for areas mountain bikers really want, instead of reacting to every wilderness bill that comes along. "Why the hell am I arguing for this postage stamp when I’ve got the rest for people to ride?" he asks.

It’s a good question. Why further complicate wilderness legislation, which is already increasingly encumbered with concessions for developers, off-road vehicle riders, oil and gas drillers? IMBA should stay out of wilderness politics, unless it wants to selflessly support protection. And we mountain bikers should be content to leave our bikes behind and travel slowly when we’re out there in what little big country can still be found in the West.]]>No publisherRecreationWildernessEditor's noteWriters on the RangeArticle'You've got me wrong': A Conversation with Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworthhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/327/16451
Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth talks about how his
agency has changed over the years, defending current forest
management policies as well as the Service’s dealings with
the energy industryThis June, Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth flew into Delta, Colo., to meet with the local staff of the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison National Forests — "GMUG" in local parlance. Bosworth, who became the chief in 2001, told a crowd of Forest Service employees, retirees and local conservationists that the agency he runs has turned an important corner: Restoration and recreation have replaced timber harvesting as the defining activity of the agency, which oversees more than 190 million acres, most of it in the West.

After his visit, HCN Publisher Paul Larmer and Editor Greg Hanscom caught up with Chief Bosworth. Here are the highlights from their conversations:

HCN: I was struck by how much the gathering in Delta felt like a family picnic, a feeling that you reinforced again when you said that, though you have been a Forest Service employee for four decades, your real tenure is all 62 years of your life. Is the Forest Service one big happy family?

Bosworth: Well, I was raised in the Forest Service and lived at a variety of ranger stations growing up. Often these were very remote places, so you got to know the other Forest Service families really well. It was a neat life — and probably the reason I went into the Forest Service. I noticed that Forest Service people liked what they were doing — something that I didn’t see with a lot of other people, like those who worked in the sawmills.

HCN: Has that family feeling changed?

Bosworth: Not really, though today there are a lot more women professionals in the agency, and a lot more dual-career families. People who come from other agencies to the Forest Service still say, "Gee, it really is like being part of a family here."

HCN: Yet the issues facing the agency have changed, haven’t they?

Bosworth: Yes. The 1990s were a decade of transition from the Timber Era to the Restoration and Recreation Era. I believe that restoring fire-dependent ecosystems and accommodating increasing numbers of recreationists will be the defining challenges for a couple of decades to come.

HCN: Has fire replaced timber as the agency’s raison d’etre?

Bosworth: Firefighting has always been a big part of the Forest Service, ever since the Big Blowup in Montana in 1910 (HCN, 4/23/01). But our view of fire has changed. Now we view it as an important tool in restoring our forests. A lot of our forests are too dense because we have suppressed fires for so long. So we have to do some thinning, and we have to reintroduce prescribed fire wherever we can.

HCN: Yet the agency still spends incredible amounts of money in putting out fires — at the picnic, you said that fighting fire now takes up more than 40 percent of the agency’s budget, up from 20 percent a decade ago. And I noticed that Smokey Bear is still on all of the baseball caps. Why isn’t the agency being more aggressive?

Bosworth: We need to do more, and we are moving in that direction. But to allow fires to burn in August, when they can get out of hand and burn intensely hot, would yield results we don’t want and people living near the fires don’t want. We need to use the spring and fall times to burn. And sometimes we need to do restoration work through mechanical thinning first.

HCN: How is your relationship with Mark Rey, the former timber lobbyist who oversees the Forest Service in the Department of Agriculture?

Bosworth: It’s fine. We don’t see eye to eye on everything. But I get to have my say, and I’m listened to. And I’m really pleased with the support the administration has given in some key areas. Take, for example, the problem I call "analysis paralysis." The administration has taken the heat for making some changes to streamline decision-making processes, yet I’ve been pushing for these changes.

HCN: We recently did a story that showed most of the timber projects taking place on national forests in the name of forest health these days were not approved under the new streamlined process; they went through the full NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) process (HCN, 4/17/06: The War on Wildfire). Isn’t the charge of "analysis paralysis" just a red herring for poorly planned projects that deserve to be challenged by the public?

Bosworth: I believe in good analysis before making decisions, but a lot of the laws we operate under were designed in the timber era to slow down large projects. We’re in a whole new era now, and it makes sense to use the public dollars on the ground rather than doing excessive paper analysis.

HCN: Still, if the Forest Service is getting so much done under the old rules, can you see why we might wonder about the need to change them?

Bosworth: I understand. We’ve been working under the old authorities for a long time. We know how to get work done. The issue is whether we can become more efficient — still collaborate with the public, but get the job done quicker and save some taxpayer dollars. Community wildfire protection plans have been huge. Communities help set the priorities. Another big improvement is the new objection process versus the old appeals. We tell the public what the decision was going to be, and they have a 30-day period to make objections. We can make an adjustment and move on.

HCN: In the past, High Country News has split Forest Service officials into two camps. One camp includes people like former Chief Mike Dombeck, who made public trust and participation top priorities. The other camp is the "experts," the folks who say that the Forest Service knows what’s best for the forests, and the public ought to get out of the way. We’ve put you in the second camp.

Bosworth: I think that you’ve got me wrong. I’m not sure that I fall into one camp or another. I think that the professionals in the Forest Service ought to be trusted to provide the best information available, and to work with the public to figure out what should be done.

There was a time when foresters said, "I went to school, I got my degree, so leave me alone." Because I believe a lot of the process has become a negative in terms of getting work done on the ground, people think that I fall into the camp of "leave it to the professionals." That’s not what I’m talking about. The process needs to include the people; unless we reach some kind of consensus on how to manage the land, it won’t get implemented. But it also needs to be modernized. I don’t want the public to be burdened with process that doesn’t add value to the decisions that are going to be made.

In the end, the thing that will make the big difference will be having public support, working together with local people to create the projects and then get them done. They’re much more willing to work with us if they can see the results of their labor more quickly.

HCN: If analysis paralysis is such a problem, why did this administration overturn the roadless protection policy — put in place by your predecessor after an extensive NEPA process — and create a whole new bureaucratic process?

Bosworth: How you go about something is as important as the decision itself. Yes, we gathered a lot of public comment on the original roadless rule, but some people felt disenfranchised by the process. Then we had a series of lawsuits. So we’re trying the state-by-state approach, letting the governors come up with recommendations.

HCN: How much power do states have in determining what roadless areas will be protected?

Bosworth: That’s going to depend on a case by case (approach). But if a governor sends in a petition for a certain number of acres to remain roadless, I think there’s a good chance that it’s going to be followed.

Ultimately, I believe the bulk of the roadless areas should remain roadless, but not necessarily become wilderness. We need those in-between areas: not formal wilderness, but still roadless. That’s where I go with my family to fish and hike.

HCN: Here on our local forest in Western Colorado, the GMUG, parts of the Clear Fork roadless area are about to be leased for energy exploration. What happens if these areas are leased, and then the governor recommends protection? Can the Forest Service back out of those leases?

Bosworth: In some cases, forests call for "no surface occupancy" in roadless areas. That means you’d have to directionally drill from outside of the roadless area. There are situations where we’ve traded leases with companies. We can’t just take away something that somebody’s paid for. The company has to be willing also, but we can usually find solutions to that kind of stuff.

HCN: We’ve heard a lot of complaints in the past four or six years about decisions being made high up in the Agriculture Department — often over your head. The Biscuit Fire salvage logging is the prime case in point (HCN, 5/16/05: Unsalvageable). But there’s a more recent example, again, here on the GMUG. The forest was scheduled to release its new forest plan last week, but has been delayed. Word on the street is that an energy company, Gunnison Energy, was not happy with the options for energy development in the plan, and that Mark Rey intervened. I’m told that the plan will be released late, with errata additions to some portions.

Bosworth: I was a forest planner during the first round of forest plans — on the Flathead in Montana. Our forest plans were being heavily reviewed in the Washington office. We’re not having any of that going on today. We get questions. We ask questions. We meet with forest planners. From time to time, people on the forest think that "somebody must be up there trying to change what we’re doing." I used to think that. That’s not the situation on the GMUG plan.

HCN: What is the situation?

Bosworth: I think there are some questions being asked. I wouldn’t expect to see any errata sheets. I have never heard of any energy company coming to talk to me or anybody in the department. I just don’t think that’s the case.

HCN: So the energy industry is not running the Forest Service?

Bosworth: The energy industry is not running the Forest Service.

Editor’s note: The Forest Service’s Washington, D.C., office could provide no examples of the agency buying back or trading out energy leases. Spokeswoman Christie Achenbach could only say that "existing leases do stand," and that it would require an act of Congress to override a lease. As this issue went to press, the draft GMUG forest plan is still under wraps. Forest Supervisor Charlie Richmond says the Forest Service’s Washington, D.C., office and Mark Rey’s office have been looking at the plan. While he has no knowledge of meetings between agency officials and the energy industry, energy issues are one main concern. Under scrutiny are the definitions of "reclamation" versus "restoration" following drilling activity, and which energy development guidelines will apply on different parts of the forests. He doesn’t know when the plan will be released, but he says it is likely to include errata sheets with some changes.

]]>No publisherWildlifeProfilesArticlePlaying God in suburbiahttp://www.hcn.org/issues/327/16446
Is it really true that the U.S. has no choice but to
employ a harsh form of triage in deciding which endangered species
should live, and which must die?
Here’s how they work: Faced with a bus crash or an earthquake
— an accident that creates more victims than you can tend to
at once — your job is to quickly survey the patients. Then,
you assign each one a color-coded card, which has perforated color
strips across the bottom. A patient with a green card is injured,
but not seriously. A yellow card indicates serious but not
life-threatening injuries, while a red card means the patient has
life-threatening injuries in need of immediate attention. Finally,
a black card indicates that a patient is dead — or about to
be.

This triage system, pioneered during the Korean War,
is designed to give the greatest number of people their best shot
at survival. In a situation where resources are limited, it’s
a harsh but necessary solution. But it puts the medic in a horrible
position: You have to decide who is likely to live or die.

According to some people, we’re in just such a
situation with the West’s wildlife. Rob Roy Ramey, the
Colorado scientist who plays one of the starring roles in this
issue’s cover story, says that in a world where conservation
resources are limited, "We have to do triage." We have to choose
which habitat to protect and which wildlife to restore — and
we have to decide which ones to let die.

To some extent,
we’ve been doing this for a long time. Conservation groups
have to pick their battles wisely, or risk losing them all. Land
trusts have to be strategic about where conservation easements will
do the most good. State and federal wildlife agencies make tough
decisions every day about where they’ll spend their limited
time and money. But are conditions now so dire that we need to
abandon certain species (or subspecies, such as the Preble’s
meadow jumping mouse, the subject of this story) entirely because
our attention is needed elsewhere? I’d like to think not.

Of all of the public-land management agencies that have
been pinched for money in recent years, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service has perhaps been squeezed the hardest. Last year, the
agency received just $69 million for endangered species recovery.
Compare that to the $4.8 billion Congress appropriated for national
highways, or the $1.3 billion it spent on early reading programs,
or the $880 million allotted for nuclear waste disposal.
We’re a wealthy society. Surely we can dig a little more
change out of the couch for wildlife.

It also seems to me
that we’re smart enough to accommodate a few more people in
the West and still preserve wildlife habitat. We don’t have
to wreck Colorado’s economy to protect a few thousand acres
for the Preble’s mouse.

Then again, maybe
we’ve decided, as a people, that we’re only willing to
stretch so far for other creatures. If so, we’re playing God
with the West. The outcome, even if we succeed in saving a few
chosen species, is sure to be heart-breaking.

]]>No publisherWildlifeEditor's noteWriters on the RangeArticleNovember Surprisehttp://www.hcn.org/issues/326/16410
Ray Ring’s cover story on the libertarian stealth
campaign to put "takings" initiatives on Western ballots is the
biggest untold political story of the year Ray’s story
gets under the surface of a Westwide campaign that has received
scant attention from the regional press, considering that it could
literally lay waste to state and local land-use planning. Sure,
there have been scattered stories about one or another of the
ballot initiatives in this campaign, but no one has traced the
campaign to its libertarian funders in Chicago, New York City and
Washington, D.C. No one has documented how this money pays
out-of-state signature gatherers to put the initiatives on the
ballot. And few have seen through the sales pitch — which
often says that a vote for these initiatives is a vote to rein in
the government’s power to take people’s land —
and found that the real agenda is much, much bigger.

There’s no denying that it’s a brilliant strategy.
Libertarians have tried for years to push "takings" legislation
through state legislatures, and they’ve discovered that
it’s all but impossible; look closely at "takings," and you
realize that the real goal is unraveling government. So
they’ve found a way to take the issue directly to the voters,
who often don’t have the time to consider the details. With a
campaign driven by TV sound bites, they know they can win. Just
look at Oregon, where voters blithely approved the mother of all
takings initiatives in 2004: Measure 37.

In the aftermath
of Measure 37, Defenders of Wildlife commissioned a study to find
out why planning advocates lost. The study found that the
measure’s backers cast the story as a "David vs. Goliath"
tale, in which the big bad government was stomping on the little
landowners. The report suggested that opponents should have turned
the tables with tales of land-use regs saving ordinary people from
developers who want to build Wal-Marts, cookie-cutter subdivisions
or gravel mines next door.

Telling good stories is key in
this fight — and if supporters of land-use planning want to
have a chance in November, they’d better start telling those
stories now. But Measure 37 carried another lesson: The problem in
Oregon wasn’t just the sometimes overbearing regulations; the
problem was that planners had stopped listening to the people.

A study penned by a team of academics in the wake of
Oregon planners’ first big defeat at the ballot box —
Measure 7, which passed in 2000, but was later thrown out by the
state Supreme Court — found that the measure passed because
of misunderstandings, misinformation and frustration with the
planning bureaucracy. It recommended that the state expand
education programs, streamline the planning process and address the
ubiquitous concern that the planning system wasn’t benefiting
all Oregonians equally.

That never happened. Four years
later, Measure 37 passed by an even larger margin than Measure 7
— and this time, Oregon’s Supreme Court stood behind
it. Now, some of the most visionary land-use regulations in the
country have been rendered powerless.

If we want to have
any hope of creating progressive land-use planning systems, our
first task is to knock back the initiatives on state ballots this
year. And over the long term, we need to recognize that the key to
land-use planning is listening, listening some more, and then
creating and re-creating land-use systems that really work for
people. Good planning is the messy stuff of democracy — and
without it, stealth, sound-bite campaigns can turn things
upside-down.

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